Jigsaw Press, $0.99, ISBN 978-1934340110
Historical Fiction, 2016

ML Bushman’s Can of Worms is labeled as romance, but I confess I have my doubts about a romance with such a title. This is not going to be a romance between a woman and a were-worm, is it, or worse, a polyamorous romance with a can of were-worms?

Well, it turns out that this is a Western fiction, so I’m not sure how the romance tag fits with this one.

More significantly, unlike an installment in a romance series, this one seems like part of an ongoing series instead of a standalone story. So, readers reading this one without having read any of the other stories in this Eli Stone series will be getting pretty much story with no beginning and no end. This is the sixth entry in the series, after all.

This story serves to advance an arc in Eli Stone’s life: the death of whom I suppose is a main or important secondary character. So, since I don’t know any of these people, I have zero investment in the dramatic scene.

I can say, however, that the author has an attractive gritty, blunt narrative style that fits the tone and atmosphere of a Western series very well. It’s masculine in tone and style, but not too masculine to alienate people that prefer a softer, feminine narrative style. 

However, the author tends to be tad too fond of dialogues. This story is practically narrated through conversations between Eli and two or three other characters. It reduces me, the reader, into the role of a passive eavesdropper, which further distances me from the story.

Letting me “see” the characters do things instead of having them tell me about it would have helped in making me get more emotionally invested in the story. Who knows, I may even want to pick up the earlier installments. Crazy, huh?

As it is, I’m intrigued by the author’s style, but I’d likely pick up a more standalone work instead of past or future installments of this series. Who knows, maybe that could be a fun trip in itself.