Publisher's Weekly
In 1900, Henry Logan, a gunsmith from Kansas City, is asked by a lawyer friend to search for a fellow named Rip Parrish. Parrish's trust fund checks are being cashed, but letters sent to him in Nogales, Ariz., go unanswered. Thinking that the air in Arizona might be good for his recurrent malaria (picked up during the Spanish-American War), Logan goes to Nogales, and promptly falls for Parrish's fetching wife, although she's suspected of being involved in her husband's disappearance. Ensuing events are complicated by a telegrapher's error in calling Logan a ''gunman'' rather than ''gunsmith'' and further exacerbated by a newsman's creative journalism, so that every pistol-packin' cowpoke in Nogales wants to take him on. Logan does some fancy shooting down at the newspaper office to show the townsfolk who's who and checks out leads to Parrish's disappearance, sleuthing from the original viewpoint of a gunsmith and sharpshooter. His investigation culminates in a climactic shoot-out with the culprit. Some stilted dialogue (''I have shaken the dust of that town forever'') is the only drawback to this low-key, reasonably believable Western.

Genre: Western