BRIONNE (audiobook) by Louis L'Amour


Originally published in 1968.
Audiobook published in 2016 by Random House Audio.
Read by Erik Singer.
Duration: 4 hours, 3 minutes.
Unabridged.

Synopsis

Major James Brionne is a Virginian and a confidante of President Ulysses S. Grant. He helped pacify the region immediately after the war, including hanging a criminal named Allard.

The rest of the Allard family gang, bushwackers from the brutal Missouri theater of the Civil War, comes to Virginia to kill Brionne. They don't find Brionne, but they do find his wife and son at Brionne's plantation house. She takes out one of the Allard gang and then kills herself rather than be brutalized by them.

The Allard gang never finds Brionne's son, who had hidden himself in a little cave nearby.

Brionne decides he needs a massive change of scenery. He takes his son out West on a train, to a region he had explored as part of a military mission years earlier. He wants to find a place to start over with his son - Utah.

But, Briolle gets the feeling that something is not right about other passengers on the train...

My review

Parts of this book are truly exciting, such the attack on the Briolle mansion and the prairie fire. However, the idea that a family gang would travel halfway across the country for revenge and then travel most of the way back across the country in an attempt to get even seemed more than a little farfetched to me.

This story was not a bad story, but it just felt underdeveloped. If I had been L'Amour's editor way back in 1968, I would have told him to add another 2 hours worth of story to this 4 hour audiobook and flesh out more of the characters and their story arcs.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Brionne by Louis L'Amour. 

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