MARK JUSTICE'S THE DEAD SHERIFF #5: PHILLIP PAN'S A COLD AND LONESOME GRAVE

I love Mark Justice's The Dead Sheriff saga and monster rallies in general. Thanks to Phillip Pan (aka Michael Panush), I've been granted the best of both weird worlds with the author's imaginative A Cold and Lonesome Grave. 

The fifth volume in the Airship 27 series has Sam (aka Cheveyo), his cadaver-lawman puppet and Bostonian reporter, Richard O'Malley, in the frigid Canadian Rockies, stationed between competing factions: the Fenians (wily, Irish "free-fighters") and a British, scientific expedition. The former hopes to nab a fabled Sasquatch for profit (to finance a campaign against English imperialists and attain Irish Home Rule) and the latter wishes to study the apish breed, suspecting it might be an evolutionary link. 

A Cold and Lonesome Grave also insinuates a clash of in-charge women, with the erudite Lady Wilhelmina Thorne leading the Brits (accompanied by Corporal Ram Singh, in a nod to the knife-throwing adjutant of the classic pulp hero, The Spider) and O'Malley's old flame, Lizzie Callahan, aka The Banshee, a costumed crusader who helms the earthy rebels. O'Malley's sentimental ties to Callahan persuade him to favor the Fenian Cause, but nothing ever runs so smoothly in a Dead Sheriff adventure. 

That means the menacing Master once more tries to pull the supernatural strings from Sam by tossing another mythical monster into the mix: the carnivorous Carter, a Wendigo determined to destroy the wayward half-breed and his animated corpse. But the creature quotient doesn't end there, for a baby Bigfoot named Charlie Darwin also enters the picture, but will the cute specimen quell hostilities or just add further fuel to the tumultuous fire? 

Pan's writing is homespun yet suspenseful, with an underlying, wry disposition that suits Justice's celebrated creation to a tee; and the deft text is adorned by no less than Rob Davis' detailed interiors and capped by Michael Youngblood's fearsome, snowy cover. (I'm also flattered and grateful that the author referenced my Dead Sheriff exploit, Purity, in his wonderous novel. Thank you, my creative friend.) 

A Cold and Lonesome Grave is a mythological-monster triumph and as such, an absolute essential for all Dead Sheriff fans:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1953589499/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_image_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1