Rebels & Desperados / John R. Stuart (ePub)

The year is 1888. Young Confederate secret agent and outlaw -"Black" Judah Lee is the most wanted man in all of North America. His alliance with the Métis warrior nation and his daring bank and train robberies in the Disputed Territories of Dakota and Assiniboia have brought him to the attention of the grim and bloodthirsty Mountie - Superintendent Thornton. Lee and his psychotic partner Drake Kensington have barely managed to avoid capture, but the Mounties and Pinkerton's are closing in! Lee has fallen into a world populated by gamblers, rebels, renegade Indians, outlaws, murderers, desperados and whores; his crucial mission to aid the Confederacy hangs in the balance as he blazes a trail of blood and murder across the West.

Praise for Rebels & Desperados

Excellent alternate history saga woven through with historical characters and plausible scenarios. Stuart can certainly write well as he weaves a common theme through this historical trilogy (with a marvelous fourth book loaded with short stories and scenarios he couldn't work into his main three books) following a half century of service, intrigue, betrayals, obsessions, strategies, wins and losses. He primarily follows one family through it all; it is fascinating and unlike anything I've ever read. It certainly turns history upside down. Stuart develops characters exceedingly well, and makes you love, hate, admire or fear them. It was what I call a really fun read (admittedly, it helps to have a basic knowledge or our history so that one can see the "divergences", understand and delight it them) Larry Thompson

It's 1888, when a delicate peace exists between the Confederate States of America and the United States of America, the latter having been vanquished in 1863 after a Rebel victory at Gettysburg. CSA President James Longstreet manages a Confederacy that has freed its slaves, annexed California and taken north Mexico by force, calling it State of South Texas. Britain, still at war with France, controls Canada, except for a lawless region including Alberta, Montana and several other American and Canadian states. This area is called the Disputed Zone, or the Cauldron, a haven for outlaws, desperados, rebels and renegade Indians.
If this wildly creative setting is not enough to grab your attention (it certainly caught mine!) then the unique plot certainly will. It concerns the meanderings through the aforesaid hostile territories of CSA secret agent and train wrecker "Black" Judah Lee, his "dark angel" whore Bella, his compatriot Big Drake and Drake's bigger wife Carmen, and Lee's would be nemesis, soldier Lawrence Thorenson. Of course, the Mounties, Pinkertons as well as Confederate and American troops are hot on Lee's trail, as he pursues a secret CSA mission. Along the way, there are shootouts, brothel sex (described once as "riding a wild bronco through a volcano"), elaborate duels, train and bank robberies, and much more wanton sex. Injected into the fiction are historical characters such as Longstreet, his Vice President Nathan Bedford Forrest, and former CSA Generals Jubal Early and George Pickett, who wage one of this eBook's most intriguing duels. And there's the Confederate battleship, Jefferson Davis.
The body count and carnage are prominent characters in this wild shootout, and the dialogue is as salty as that of any other book ever written. But the action is non-stop, the story riveting, and the weird mixture of alternate history and western story such that I read the whole thing through in one sitting.
If you like a really wild west, a plot that moves like a nuclear locomotive, and well-drawn, bizarre characters mingling with real-life ex-Confederate generals, this is the story for you! John Frasier