The time is the cruel winter of 1863-1864, in the Civil War era. The place is the practically lawless gold rush country in what is to become the state of Montana. The story is one of forbidden love and vigilantism, but the hero, Dan Stark, does not love his horse. His Spenser rifle, perhaps, but not the horse. What's more, he is a lawyer and a surveyor, not a prospector, as are many of the other rough characters that populate Carol Buchanan's Alder Gulch.
Foremost, God's Thunderbolt is a work about Montana and, specifically, the Vigilantes who executed (literally) justice on a gang of thieves that included local law enforcement officials. They brought some semblance of much needed order to the area in the times just before the country's government declared it to be an official U.S. Territory. In that aspect, the book can be classified in the genre of Westerns. It is also Historical Fiction and, to some degree, Romance, a bodice-ripper with the obligatory purple passion ending.
Buchanan does a masterful job at portraying her characters from the inside out. The tensions that tear people apart, those between heart and head, social custom and law and church, need and desire surface in elegant descriptions. The plot may not be complex, but subsistence living of the time is not, either. What it is, however, is brutal and bone chilling, dirty, starving, and incredibly smelly. As much imagination as research went into building the story, and this is meant in a good way. It is not a fantasy life shown, but realistic living at the most basic level. Think camping without the camping gear or grounds. “Primitive” definitely captures the lives the people are leading in the area of Alder Gulch.
This is not to say that there aren't several lines of action going on simultaneously in the plot. Underlying all the players' actions are the conflicts of the Civil War. In this time of black-and-white thinking - you are either Union or Secessionist (shortened to "secesh"). Concomitant with the military issues are perplexing and divisive questions about slavery: how to handle the freed, how freed slaves should behave toward whites, and how whites on both sides of the controversy over slavery treat each other.
Article comments
1 - Carol Buchanan
Thank you, Georganna! I'm always interested to see how different people react to God's Thunderbolt, and I appreciate the depth of thought you put into the review. And no, I'm not thinking "At last"; I know you're one of the busier people on the planet.