This haunting Western story features a man brought back from the dead to exact revenge upon those who have wronged him, only to discover that the world is capable of good—for readers of Charles Portis, Elmore Leonard, and Annie Proulx

It’s winter 1935 in the mountains of Montana. It’s coming on dusk and an old prospector finds himself staring down the barrel of a large pistol wielded by a bleeding, bedraggled corpse of a man standing in a freshly undug grave. The man is one Benjamin Kilt, left bludgeoned and buried alive by his bank robbing partner/half-brother, Bosco, and it is the prospector’s ill timed (for him) timely (for Kilt) arrival on the scene that sets in motion this classic western tale of revenge. 

Kilt will be joined in his journey to find and reap revenge on Bosco by Bonnie, a thirteen-year-old Native American girl he somewhat reluctantly rescues from her abusive “keeper.” It is Bonnie’s recollections in old age of their brief time together that provide the reader entre into Kilt’s life: from the child left orphaned by a suicidal mother in a midwestern brothel to the philosophical bank robber found near death in the snowy mountain wilds of Montana. And it is through the filter of Bonnie’s gaze that we watch as the thornier threads and deeper themes of Dane Bahr’s masterful tale unwind, leading to a showdown between the brothers at the very ranch where they were raised.

The Dead Ringer explores the slippery distinction between justice and revenge, and the moral dilemma of the justification of questionable deeds done for honorable ends. It tackles these thorny themes with the moving prose, memorable characters, propulsive plot, and evocative sense of place that have defined Bahr’s genre-bending novels from the first.