The spate of previously uncollected L'Amour short stories that have surfaced recently reveal L'Amour's broad talent and ability to master every genre from mystery to sports to mainstream fiction. But when readers think of L'Amour, they still think westerns, from Hondo (1953) to the Sackett epics. This collection, the first in a multivolume set, focuses on the West (the frontier stories ), and it is vintage L'Amour. The Gift of Cochise opens the collection with a Hondo-like tale of a good man going to great lengths to protect the wife of a man he was forced to kill. A nameless drifter didn't have to confront the rustlers who threatened to take over his town, but after all, he was Duffy's Man, and when you hired on, you did the tough work if you accepted the pay. L'Amour wrote about the big themes--love, courage, loyalty, honor--but he grounded them firmly in the context of daily struggles in an unforgiving land. A fine start to what will become an essential collection. --Wes Lukowsky Copyright 2003 Booklist

Tell Sackett tries his hand as a doughnut maker; a white woman makes friends with Cochise, the Apache chieftain; Finn Mahone foils an insidious plot to take control of the Lazy K Ranch. These and 31 other tales of courage in the Old West fill this volume of western morality tales by the multi-award-winning L'Amour. These are stories of hard men in worse places, youths winning their way to manhood, and women standing firm for what they believe. The novella Rustler Roundup would have made a fine Gene Autry movie. Pure reading pleasure for anyone who enjoys the triumph of good over evil and courage over cowardice. Recommended for all libraries carrying western fiction.-Ken St. Andre, Phoenix P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.