Moment of Vengeance and Other Stories

Before he brilliantly traversed the gritty landscapes of underworld Detroit and Miami, the incomparable Elmore Leonard wrote breathtaking adventures set in America's nineteenth-century western frontier -- elevating a popular genre with his now-trademark twisting plots, rich characterizations, and scalpel-sharp dialogue.There is a moment when obsession, rage, and destiny come together at the end of a shotgun barrel -- when wrongs, actual or perceived, are addressed with violence, and the awesome power of life or death rests in a trigger finger. In seven magnificent stories of sins, crimes, conscience, and savage retribution, the New York Times-bestselling master carries us back to an untamed time and place where a simple transgression most often proved fatal . . . and the only true justice lived in the hands of the gunman.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.