Benjamin Shreve is a good man. He’s the kind of man who keeps his promises, no matter how much it inconveniences him. In The Madstone, by Elizabeth Crook, we see how much it costs Benjamin to keep a simple promise to take a man from one town to another. This time, a simple promise might cost Benjamin his life. It will definitely cost him his heart.
Benjamin lives a quiet life in the small town of Comfort, Texas, among the German settlers. He works as a carpenter and general handyman and seems to have no ambitions for anything more. We meet Benjamin on a day when something actually happens in Comfort: a man has been stranded by a stagecoach and no one will rent him a horse. As one of the few horse owners in town, Benjamin cuts a deal with the man, appropriately nicknamed Dickie, to deliver him to the next town down the line. All Benjamin expects at the end of this small job is a few dollars in return for his kindness. Little does he know that a simple trip down the road will soon turn into an epic race across the hot, dusty Texas landscape with a group of really violent men behind him.
Benjamin’s account takes the form of a very long letter to someone we only know as Tot, so that Tot can know more about where he came from. This little mystery gets a little lost over the course of the novel; it’s not until the very end that we learn just why Tot might need some stranger from the middle of nowhere Texas to tell him his past. Benjamin first meets Tot on the road from Comfort, with a grumbling Dickie, when the two men find the stagecoach Dickie was supposed to be on under attack from men clearly in disguise as Native Americans. Once the coach driver and passengers—Nell and Tot—are rescued, Benjamin finds himself cajoled into taking Dickie, Nell, and Tot on to San Antonio to try and get them to the next leg of their journey to the Texas coast. Each day sees Benjamin traveling further away from whatever was keeping him in Comfort.
Other little mysteries get swept away in Benjamin’s account of traveling across Texas. What is Dickie hiding in his luggage? Are his stories about treasure hunting true? Why are the stagecoaches in this place so poorly protected? Is Dickie cursed with bad luck? Instead of ruminating on these questions, Benjamin instead focuses on what caused a pregnant Nell to up stakes with Tot and light out on her own: her Klan in-laws. It’s a little frustrating to watch Benjamin consistently refuse to take tangents in his account. He’s definitely not the storyteller that Dickie is. But I found my annoyance waning as Benjamin began to fall in love with Nell and daydream about what it might be like to have a family, instead of living a lonely bachelor life.
The Madstone improves once we know more about what’s after Nell and Tot and the race to the Texas coast, where Nell and Tot can take a ship to New Orleans and safety, kicks off. More than once I had my heart in my mouth as the small party’s luck turned bad, allowing the Klansmen the chance to catch up. The tension was strong enough that I was mostly able to forget the fact that this plot was trailing more loose threads than a cheap pair of old jeans. I don’t want to knock this book too much. I really did enjoy the chase and the heroics. My quibble is that, once I reached the end of the book, I still had a lot of questions that were never really addressed satisfactorily. Consider this my caveat to an otherwise decent read.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.
