Lackey, Mercedes & Edghill, Rosemary: Dead Reckoning (2012)

Artist: Regina Hoff — Artist: Regina Roff

I have been looking for an updated website for Rosemary Edghill. This link is old (2013). I haven’t found one anywhere else, but she is still alive. She and Mercedes Lackey wrote Dead Reckoning together.

The setting of Dead Reckoning is the Wild West a couple of years after the Civil War. Two of our characters are from either side of the issue while the third is indirectly an American Indian. Jett’s story set me looking for how likely it was that a woman would cross-dress around the time of the Civil War. Well, it happened and not that seldom either. There really wasn’t much choice for any of them. Not for Jett either. If she/he wanted to go off and try to find her brother she would have trouble doing so as a woman. It simply was not accepted. But all of her female habits had to be set aside and Jett had to learn how to walk, talk and adapt the mannerisms of the men of her time to be left alone. She also had to shoot really well, because sometimes seeming like a post-adolescent boy brought many of the same challenges women had. Gunslingers were the shooters who were quick draws and fast shooters.

Honoria had the advantage of an unconventional childhood with an eccentric father. Perhaps eccentric isn’t the correct word. Her father was a genius whose ideas kept interrupting his life and drawing him into new mind-zones. With a daughter just as bright, that may have been a good thing. Honoria was given the freedom to study what she wanted and that enabled her to do what other unusual women of her time also did, invent. I found myself rather liking her insistence upon science over all. Sometimes I wanted to tell her to get over herself, but she was consistent with her character all the way through.

In fact, that can be said of all three characters. Jett remained the male she wanted to be taken for. The last of the three compatriots, White Fox, was consistent with the civilian scout and Algonquin adoptee he was supposed to be. White Fox was on a mission for the 10th Cavalry to find out what had happened to his Captain’s mother at Glory Rest. What he discovered was that the town was completely deserted. There had, in fact, been several incidents of people disappearing or groups of people being slaughtered by unknown parties. The disappearing people fit with the allegations Honoria was investigating.

Their encounters with zombies and cultists are fun and full of action.

Recommended.

Reviews:

Dead Reckoning available at

Ebook available for kindle US, kindle UK & nook