"The Feudist: A Novel of the Pleasant Valley War is both a traditional Western, tense, authentic, fast-paced, and an anti-Western, that tells the story of what was perhaps the bloodiest range war in US history: Arizona's 1880s Pleasant Valley War. Ben Holcomb, the narrator, begins the story as a stock boy in Globe City, Arizona. Bored with his job, he decides to become an apprentice cowboy. His journey to his future employer's ranch leads him into a smoldering range war -- and though Ben tries to stay out of the quarreling, he finds himself embroiled as he stumbles through passionate love, devastating loss, and moral uncertainty. Over the next year, he unwittingly joins the wrong side in a shootout, then later tries stop three murders -- along the way taking the reader on a hair-raising midnight ride with a lynch party. He falls in love with the younger wife of a polygamous Mormon elder, witnesses the killing of a Mexican shepherd, and nearly dies himself before half-wittingly becoming an accessory to a revenge killing. Who are the heroes here, who the villains? Herman's impressive research shows in his keen eye for historical detail and in the authentic voices of a broad cast of actors who are anything but one-dimensional, giving the novel a verisimilitude that transcends the genre Western and far surpasses Zane Grey's 1922 romance about the Pleasant Valley War, To the Last Man"--