Last year's With These Hands [BKL Ap15 02] was intended to be the last posthumous L'Amour collection. But Louis' son, Beau, and a dedicated team of researchers have continued to unearth more manuscripts. This one contains L'Amour's first and last short stories, two World War II adventures, four westerns, two football stories, and two crime capers. Some of the stories are dated--especially the football pieces--but all are generally enjoyable. L'Amour was a straightforward storyteller: there's an identifiable beginning, middle, and, most important, a satisfying conclusion to each tale. Typically the protagonist also faces and resolves some sort of moral dilemma. Among the highlights are "Anything for a Pal," the author's first short story, and "Sand Trap," in which a victim turns the tables on his opponents and uses the desert as a weapon. Even the passing of time doesn't seem to diminish L'Amour's remarkable appeal. Expect this collection to circulate well with his well-established audience. Wes Lukowsky

Last year, Bantam published what was then thought to be the fourth and final posthumous collection of short stories by L'Amour (1908-1988), With These Hands. Yet as the author's son explains in an afterword, the family soon discovered a few more stragglers. These 12 stories, a mix of westerns, crime, sports and spy yarns drawn from L'Amour's prolific career as a genre writer for pulp magazines, are every bit as entertaining as those in the last few collections. Typically, the tales of revenge and honor are punctuated with gunfights, fistfights and sports action. In "Sand Trap," a man being framed for robbery and murder leads his tormentors into the inhospitable desert of Death Valley, where he has a few tricks in store for them. "Moran of the Tigers" follows pro football player Flash Moran, who tries to save his disintegrating team from vicious gamblers and inside-the-huddle treachery. WWII spy adventure stories were favorites of L'Amour's, and his hard-boiled soldier-of-fortune pilot, Turk Madden, appears in several of these stories. In "Flight to the North," Turk uncovers an Axis spy and a secret Japanese airbase hidden in the frozen wasteland of Siberia. Best among these yarns is the title story, a western about a wounded outlaw desperately trying to hold off his pursuers until he can finish writing a special letter to his young son. Filled with grit and gun smoke, this collection is a fine coda to the legendary author's achievements. (May 6) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Twelve nifty tales, quite possibly the last from the drawer of L'Amour (1908-88), as collected and edited by son Beau L'Amour, who is also gathering material for a L'Amour biography. These entries, three never before published, include the first and last that L'Amour wrote. Kickoff is the masterful "Sand Trap," a fearless melodrama stained with human feeling: A man wakes up on a kitchen floor, no idea how he got there, his scalp split to the bone; he can barely move, there's a dead man beside him, and the house is on fire--and quickly L'Amour rouses sympathy for this trapped soul. How's that for an opener? "Anything for a Pal," L'Amour's virgin effort at storytelling, shows great skill at handling clichÉs as it tells of Tony Kinsella, torpedo for a mob boss, who has to kill a witness to save his boss from the chair. To measure L'Amour's growth from this clean-limbed but banal work to each of the other stories should cheer any tyro writer hoping to learn. The title story, one of the longer tales here, finds L'Amour sinking into a blaze of plotting as the Tremayne family rebuffs death threats and false arrests and goes into hiding from various posses. The story carves a large arc and is especially brilliant in the romance between the storyteller, to whom a woman is as rare and strange a creature as something from the depths of the sea, and the girl he marries but then must leave, though she's pregnant. L'Amour's very last story, "The Moon of the Trees Broken by Snow," finds him, like Homer in the Odyssey, moving from realism to abstraction and magic. In some dateless period in the past, a 12-year-old boy, now head of the family, leads the family from their drought-stricken homeland to a new land that he's led to by a large star in the southern sky. We'll say no more. Fans, rejoice. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.