Blinn, William. A Cold Place in Hell. Pinnacle, 2009. ISBN 978-0786020768 272 pp. $

**

A young cowboy takes a bet to stay on the back of a bucking bronco for tenseconds, but makes it past the halfway mark when he is thrown and stampeded over. If he were a hoss, they’d a shot him. Billy heals slowly, and takes up book learning when it becomes clear he won’t be cowboying anymore.

Written by a screenwriter, A Cold Place in Hell is fairly well-written and very visual, with scenes playing out like a movie in my mind, but the characters and voices didn’t seem authentic to time and place. This Westerns has all the requisite elements: the rich rancher, the ingenue cowboy, the weathered mentor, the whore with a heart of gold, and might be a great readalike for fans of Lonesome Dove, but I dropped this one after 50 pages.