Streets Of Laredo : A Novel

Old Cowboys and ruthless villains are my favorite characters to read about. This book is full of action, suspense and adventure. It also tells a great love story. Powerful women hardened by life find a way to survive and still manage to love.

If you are a fan of Lonesome Dove then it is worth following Woodrow Call on one last adventure. Typical to McMurtry, the unfairness of life is evident in his tale, good guys actually get hurt and sometimes die. I like the realism and the depth and variety of the characters. It's not all killing and it's not all heroes saving the day.

I love Larry McMurtry's writing style and use of old west "cowboy jargon" and words of wisdom. The Laredo story line is not as captivating as The Lonesome Dove, but I'm only about halfway through. It's still the best of the western genre.

The book is good, quite grim, without a lot of the charm of Lonesome Dove.

That said, I was appalled by the poor quality of the copy-editing in the Kindle version. There was an entire stretch that felt like it had been OCR'd by an intern and put into the book without a second glance.

I am by now well used to uncorrect-ed hy-phenation in Kind-le editions, but this was of such poor quality that one had to puzzle out the meaning of some of the words. 1 V/ant to read rny |(indle books, n0t decipher them.

I knocked a star off this review for the poor production value.

Sometimes a sequel struggles to be as good as its predecessor, and I feel this book missed the mark. I enjoyed Lonesome Dove so much, and I was hoping that this one would be just as good. It was interesting and action-packed, but I couldn't help comparing it to Lonesome Dove. I wish I had read Streets of Laredo first!

After falling madly in love with Lonesome Dove, McMurtry's subsequent novels leave much to be desired. Streets of Laredo wasn't bad, and I did enjoy the book, it's hard not to get swept away by Captain Call, so as sequels go I would still recommend it

This novel was much better than I expected. I've read Lonesome Dove and Dead Man's Walk. LD is a justified (although a bit windy) classic, while DMW was fine. Streets Of Laredo is now my favorite of the three. It's half the length of LD, which makes it more direct and less apt to wander. But it's still full of smart heroes, crafty/scary/evil villains, and the primal urgency of survival on the frontier that makes good Westerns such a joy to read. I must have gone back 20 times to re-read several gripping sections a second time -- some of them just conversations between tough-as-nails killers.

This story brings a wistful yet satisfying end to the Lonesome Dove series. I would recommend The Streets of Laredo and the other Lonesome Dove books to anyone who has the ability to read and appreciate good novels.

This novel was much better than I expected. I've read Lonesome Dove and Dead Man's Walk. LD is a justified (although a bit windy) classic, while DMW was fine. Streets Of Laredo is now my favorite of the three. It's half the length of LD, which makes it more direct and less apt to wander. But it's still full of smart heroes, crafty/scary/evil villains, and the primal urgency of survival on the frontier that makes good Westerns such a joy to read. I must have gone back 20 times to re-read several gripping sections a second time -- some of them just conversations between tough-as-nails killers.

This story brings a wistful yet satisfying end to the Lonesome Dove series. I would recommend The Streets of Laredo and the other Lonesome Dove books to anyone who has the ability to read and appreciate good novels.

Read reviews, but purchased anyway. Not even in the same class as LD. So disappointed but needed to find out what became of Captain Call and the Hat Creek boys. Biggest disappointments and shock Newt gone and Montana ranch went under after a couple of years. Wasn't expecting a happy ending, knew that wasn't going to happen but to have the strong Captain end up the way he did made me cry.

I read the first three books which included Comanche Moon, Dead Man's Walk and Lonesome Dove were all terrific stories with memorable characters. I am afraid that the aging Woodrow Call without McCray at his side failed to generate much interest. A disappointment.

I would have ended the saga much differently if I were the author. But I am not. I would have liked to see Gus make it to the last chapter and his relationship with Clara resume. Some authors just won't give their readers the happy ending they were looking for. I probably won't be reading McMurtry's other works.

I read "Lonesome Dove" and loved every page of it, so I was hoping I'd also like "Streets of Laredo", and I was not disappointed. McMurtry once again writes a great story with a varied cast of characters. I'm looking forward to reading the other two books in this series.

Getting a great book for under $3.00 total shipping and handling was totally fantastic. The book itself got a little tiresome - the author doesn't seem to know how to end a plot line without killing off the character but still overall great experience.

Larry McMurtry did a fine job on writing this book. Wonderful story that keeps you interested, and not knowing just what will happen next. Many twists and turns. Deeply involved plot. Large range of characters. Many thoughtful insights into human nature.

I read "Lonesome Dove" and loved every page of it, so I was hoping I'd also like "Streets of Laredo", and I was not disappointed. McMurtry once again writes a great story with a varied cast of characters. I'm looking forward to reading the other two books in this series.

Getting a great book for under $3.00 total shipping and handling was totally fantastic. The book itself got a little tiresome - the author doesn't seem to know how to end a plot line without killing off the character but still overall great experience.

Larry McMurtry did a fine job on writing this book. Wonderful story that keeps you interested, and not knowing just what will happen next. Many twists and turns. Deeply involved plot. Large range of characters. Many thoughtful insights into human nature.

SPOILER ALERT!!! DON'T READ IF YOU DON'T WANT DETAILS!!!

Like most of us, I loved Lonesome Dove. Both the novel and the miniseries, and wanted to see how it ended. I know that it would be hard to follow up a masterpiece like Lonesome Dove and didn't expect it to happen. But from an author that penned the previous, one would hope and even expect a decent novel. I had seen parts of the Streets of Laredo miniseries years ago and hated it, but film adaptations rarely are as good as the book (Lonesome Dove was an exception.) But if I expected the book to be as bad as the miniseries(and maybe I did), I was right. Streets is almost stupidly violent. After a few chapters I literally started laughing when people continued to get killed and the way they met their deaths. I know that the "Old West" was not the Garden Of Eden, but good grief this book makes Friday the 13th seem like a tame drama. It is also very rambling, kinda like me in this review. I am not an author, so I remember that when I pass judgement on a book. In fact I have never even written a review before now. But I just couldn't help it. In between the senseless acts of brutal violence this book just seems to ramble on about points that don't need to be rambled on about. Then child molestation? Putting human brains in a cup and leaving it in a jail, then worrying that the cat would eat it? I could go on but I think you get the point. And who on God's green earth could have ever expected Pea Eye Parker and Lorena Wood to get married and have a family? Pea could barely form a complete sentence in Lonesome Dove. He rangered with Gus and Call for 30 years? That would make him well over 30 years Lorena's senior. I would have loved to read about those two getting together and how the heck Lorena would fall for him. And did I miss Lorena's meeting with Mox Mox in Lonesome Dove? She apparently was almost burned by him but I don't remember reading about it. But that's another thing that is left out. What about Newt's death? He devotes literally a sentence or two about it. Newt was a major part of Call's life. I realize I'm not talking much about the rest of the plot, but the brutality completely over shadows the poor story line. In fact if there was even a good story line here, it might overcome the brutality. But sadly, there is isn't one. You can probably guess by now, but I do not recommend this book. I really can't believe this is from the same author.

Let's take a moment to look at just a couple of characters-

Mox Mox: A short little man who enjoys the simple things in life, like taking long walks on the beach with his favorite dog Max Max(que tomatoes thrown at comedian), as well as burning people alive. Don't worry though, he doesn't discriminate and is an equal opportunity torturer, he burns men, women, children, and dogs(not flop!). He also likes trampling old women with horses. Captain Call ends up mortally shooting him while saving two children from Mox Mox's flames.

Joey: A good looking young lad with an addiction to stealing "nice things" from the folks on the trains he robs. He owns and operates a lovely little cave with a scenic view somewhere in the mountains where he stores his "nice things". He even wraps up his "nice things" to keep them clean. Apparently he was a sweet young boy until he was sold to the Indians for a couple years by one of Maria's husbands. Some of his hobbies include breaking open the skulls of his victims and scooping out their brains with a cup, putting the cup in the jail house, then hoping that the cat doesn't eat it. He takes pleasure in his day dreams of selling his siblings as slaves. Or, failing to find a buyer, pushing them off of a cliff. All to get the love of his mother who he hates. This troubled young lad killed and amputated the limbs of his mothers one good husband. Oh, and he has an awesome gun with a wickedly good scope and can shoot you at a 1/2 mile. Pea Eye ends up peppering him with a shotgun, then gets shot and killed by the butcher a short time later.

Maria: A fine woman who is Joey's mother but just can't seem to find the right husband. They either abused her or were decapitated. This is probably because the author seems to hate men. Anyways she has been married four times, which according to Joey makes her a whore. She loves her children dearly as any good mother does. Even Joey, whom she knows is a bad news bear. Maria had a typical McMurtry childhood, she was abused and molested(sorry, no spoiler here,read the book to find out the shocking details!!). She also has problems birthing "normal" children. The daughter is blind, one son is retarded, and the other is Joey: a murderous, diabolical, psychopath. Joey kills her in the end, if you can believe that....

Dobbie: A sweet young thing who loves her deputy husband and only wants to have him home. She is the picturesque 1950's house wife, before the 1950's house wife. She dreams of having her baby and settling down to an enjoyable life with her husband (who has gone off with Captain Woodrow F. Call to catch Joey). But life in McMurtryland never has a happy ending(always ruined by men). After lovingly checking at the jail to see if there is news of her husband, she is raped by the Sheriff(her husbands boss)because he is a man and that's what we do. Deciding that she is forever shamed, the best and only course of action is to kill herself by eating rat poison. But be sure to mix it with water!!

Brookshire: The loyal New York accountant of Railroad boss Colonel Terry. Though unfit for the trip, he soon learns the ways and is even admired by Captian Call! He loves his wife Katie, who has fat legs and cooks a mean pork chop. But surprise surprise, Katie dies while he is away. Brookshire becomes fed up and walks out from the cover of a rock and into the pistol of one Joey Garza.

Clara Allen: She takes Lorena and Pea's kids while they are off on their adventures. Lorie sends them up to Nebraska(my home) to live with Clara after learning that Mox Mox is back. Clara plays a very small part of the book, ending with her getting trampled by a horse, just like her husband way back in Lonesome Dove. We learn of this on the third to last page of the book. Third to last page third to last page.... I almost jumped out of my seat when I read that. It shouldn't have been surprising given the rest of the novel, but I wasn't ready for that!

The one interesting part of this book was how Captain Call handles being terribly wounded and life after said injury.

I'm tired of typing so I'll let you read about the rest of the characters and plots and make your own judgements. If you can't tell by now, I felt the book was so bad I had to make it humorous.
Disclaimer: this is just my opinion of the book. Many people enjoyed it.

But I am not giving up on Larry McMurtry, I will be reading Dead Man's Walk and Comanche Moon next, the first two in the Lonesome Dove series. Matt

4 stars

Woodrow Call is now nearly alone. There’s just Pea Eye Parker of the old gang left. Call is a bounty hunter and goes after bandits. Pea Eye is now married to Lorena, one of Gus’ old flames. Pea Eye and Lorena have five children. She is now a school teacher – a very long way from where she started. Pea Eye is a farmer – most of the time –when he isn’t riding with Call. Lorena resents Call’s short telegrams telling Pea where and when to appear.

Traveling with Call is a city slicker named Brookshire from New York. He works for the owner of the railroad Colonel Terry. Call doesn’t really want Brookshire with him as he prefers to travel alone.

Call has been hired to track down a bandit named Joey Garza. He is a stone cold killer, train robber and very good with the long gun. He visits a rough place called Crow Town, but wanders the prairies at will. He occasionally lives with his mother, Maria in Ojinaga. He hates her.

Pea’s decision not to go with Call torments him. Meanwhile, when Call and Brookshire reach Laredo, he hires a young deputy sheriff called Ted Plunkert to ride with them. Ted’s young wife Doobie is devastated when he decides to go with Call.

After a month of feeling bad because he did not go with Call, Pea Eye finally relents and sets out after him. He is loath to leave Lorie and the children, but he feels he must go.

The reader rides with Captain Call, Ted Plunkert, Brookshire and, eventually, Pea Eye as they aid Call in his last trek.

This is as well written and plotted as any of Larry McMurtry’s novels. It was a good novel, but I sorely missed Gus and couldn’t get past missing him. It is a novel of the desolate plains, sheer poverty of most of the Mexican villages and the beauty to be seen on the open land.
I truly enjoy Mr. McMurtry’s books, and will keep reading them.

Warning! This Review Has Spoilers

Look, I read and owned Lonesome Dove long before any film, sequel or prequels were probably even thought of by Larry McMurtry. It stood alone and I stood by all of the characters, dead or alive, and their situations. True, this is McMurtry's book and he can contradict himself in the later books if he wants but it has a plot I can't accept.

First, killing off one of the most beloved characters, Newt, who Mr. McMurtry could have built on, in a sequel. In this book there is a careless discard of Newt. In LD, we (and Call himself) watch Newt come into his own, become his own man, and finally we, like Call, are watching him with horses and herding the cattle like Dish himself had been , and who had decided to leave Montana and go see Lorena. By the time Newt reached Montana he was already an experienced hand and when Call returns from Miles City where Gus's corpse will be kept on ice until spring, he gets in the habit of watching "the boy" during roundup on the new ranch.

"...Call spent much of the afternoons and in fact even delayed going to Miles City watching Newt work with the new batch of horses...He liked to watch the boy with the horses; it had become a keen pleasure...he wanted to watch the boy....It was only when he watched with the horses that he felt himself."

And when he had to leave he gave him his gun, made Newt trail boss and gave him his prized mare, the Hell Bitch, and his own father's watch. He knew---and almost told Newt--that he was his father, and felt ashamed of himself but rode off anyway.

"Despair in his heart, [Newt] mounted the Hell Bitch as if he had ridden her for years...." Call wondered, in Miles City, if Newt was handling the Hell Bitch well. But after seeing the boy handling and breaking 20 horses, some tricky ones, he certainly wasn't fearful of his own son being killed. After all, he had been put on his first horse as a toddler by the late Jake Spoon, and was an experienced rider. We readers have been watching the boy grow into an 18-year-old young man and was proud of him.

What a great sequel Newt might have made. There was a movie and it was one of my favorites. And against McMurtry's wishes a TV sequel, Return to Lonesome Dove, was a success with Newt alive and well with Captain Call played by Jon Voight and Newt played by the same actor, Rick Schroeder. Then, probably to spite the producers (my opinion), he wrote Streets of Laredo and killed Newt off. Wow....that is cold.

The next big unimaginable plot is having Lorena marry Pea Eye Parker. Pea was at least Call's and Gus's age, at least 50, and now, in this sequel, 16 years later at about 66, he's married to her with five kids, and is working a farm. Now she's been educated from living with Clara Allen and is now a schoolteacher in Texas. She 's a sharp-talking, worn-out housewife to boot. Guess they aged quick in Texas in the late 1800s. Clara had told her that she'd better marry someone, and if not lovesick ex-top hand Dish Boggett, why not marry Pea, whose top qualification to Clara is skill with horses. So Lorie pops the q to a shocked Pea, who, 16 years after marrying her, is still reeling from bring married to Lorie, who is 30 years his junior. There's one hitch: for being Pea's wife, whenever Cap' n Call crooks his little finger (usually in the form of a curt telegram summoning Pea to go off as Call's old Ranger corporal (never got an official promotion after all these years) and chase after crooks with him.

Of course Newt's death is either unknown (it isn't even discussed with Call in the book and we aren't told that Pea Eye notified him.) McMurtry chooses to dismiss one of the most beloved characters as cruelly as if he himself were living in the late 1800s.

OK, I am glad Lorena is a teacher and had a friend in Clara who wanted the young lady to better herself. But she is misplaced here, and McMurtry is trying to convince me that she suddenly falls in love with a guy Clara chose for her, and is old enough to be her grandfather.

Also, in LD nothing is mentioned of anyone named "Mox Mox", some baaad man-burner who was even worse than Blue Duck and whom Lorie feared even more than she did the Duck, and whom Call kills, ridding the frontier of a real bad hombre. Remember, LD readers, not even her rescuer, Gus, mentioned such a guy, and he certainly would have.

As for Clara, in Lonesome Dove Sally is the elder daughter, but Larry had a memory lapse in Streets of Laredo and made Betsey the eldest. Hmmmmm. Also, to have Lorie take a bowie knife and amputate Call's leg 5rendering him a person who loses his self-esteem) and by the "former whore" he still resents---is the last straw!

Well now he is nurturing a little blind girl, Teresa, brought from Mexico. She clutches at the deeper recesses of his old heart. Come on.

Moreover, Call and now he's making a new living sharpening knives with his good hand. He is destroyed psychologically even more than those he killed.

So, out of loyalty to one of my favorite writers I was excited to see this book only to find that my favorite, Newt, was killed by the very horse his Pa had given him. I still maintain that he killed off the boy to spite the TV producers who did for Newt what he, McMurtry, should have done. But then I wasn't a fan In reviewing Streets of Laredo, note how brusquely Newt was discarded as a rank amateur. "Newt---the Captain's son, most people thought.. .had been killed late in the summer when the Hell Bitch....reared and fell back on him. ....It was the view of everyone who knew horses that, while an able ranch manager, Newt was much too inexperienced to trust with a horse as mean and as smart as the Hell Bitch. He rode her, and one day she killed him, just as Lippy and Jasper and one or two others had predicted...." That was the exit of
Newt and the final editing.
, .

Blatant money grab! obviously paid by the word!

Has NOTHING to do with the previous LD series except name only. Major characters from LD are dismissed with a paragraph at most. Revisionist history of major events from to shoe horn another idea into the franchise.

if your interested in the Hat Creek Montana ranch, forget it! It's explained away in a paragraph.

Story isn't all that bad it's just it is drowned with pointless inner dialogue of minor characters. Repetitious nonsense.

As with most McMurtry novels he has little grasp of the landscape. I doubt he's ever left is study, ever been out side for that matter.

I had read through the previous three with the same complaints but tempered with the main story and characters. They seemed to develop but this one just exploits the success of the previous.

Which brings to mind my single biggest complain about this entire series! Gus (through LD) and Call do NOTHING heroic! McMurtry NEVER explains anything heroic they do! ALL the bad guys get away or are disposed of by nature or others. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

After having seen the Lonesome Dove mini-series, I immediately rushed out to purchase the series of books. I decided to read them not in the order they were actually written, yet began with the younger days of the characters and then as they grew older. I loved Dead Man's Walk and Comanche Moon and felt Lonesome Dove was a great book too. Then I read Streets Of Laredo. HORRIBLE ending!
About the only good thing I can saw about Streets Of Laredo is the book was gritty and dark. It had the feel of a more authentic western than many books and movies. It didn't attempt to glamorize the era. However, the violence went to an extent of being pointless for the story. Sadly, it was as if McMurtry was in a rather dour mood when this book was written. Gone are the colorful characters and most anything in the way of humor. It was just a dull, sad tale and ended badly for Call.

For those who complain that McMurtry's STREETS OF LAREDO didn't have the same feel as LONESOME DOVE, it's a legitimate critique, but it's also one that misses the point.

STREETS OF LAREDO is by far a more effective, chilling and worthy book than any of the prequels that McMurtry would later pen about Gus and Call's earlier days (all of them enjoyable reads...but none of them ever managed to recapture the magice of LONESOME DOVE).

As far as I'm concerned STREETS OF LAREDO is one of the most terrifying books I've ever read. Some of the scenes of brutality and cruelty are tons more frightening and nightmarish than anything ever penned by Stephen King.

LONESOME DOVE...though, no doubt, filled with a gritty realism that has often been lacking in Westerns (either on film or in literature)...did still convey some sense of romance to the Western. Even though LONESOME DOVE is in a leagure of its own, one can still see homage being paid to classics such as RED RIVER, THE GUNFIGHTER, THE COWBOYS and THE SEARCHERS both on page and on film.

STREETS OF LAREDO strips away the romance and paints a picture of a dying era.
The likes of Woodrow and his peers have become so scarce that it's gotten to the point where a hero such as Charles Goodnight will pause in the desert to have a conversation with a human monster such as John Wesley Hardin (a chilling scene in STREETS OF LAREDO that's akin to the Angel Gabriel and Lucifer meeting face to face).

STREETS OF LAREDO is in the same league as the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone or more brutal Westerns such as Sam Peckinpah's THE WILD BUNCH (and even shares a bit with the theme of the more low-key homage to the dying West that's depicted in THE SHOOTIST). If LONESOME DOVES had its share of heroes who seem bigger than life, STREETS OF LAREDO shares all the grotesque qualities of a Leone Western by filling its landscape with characters barely worthy of life. Disurbingly nightmarish places such as Crow Town in STREETS OF LAREDO would not be at all out of place in one of Leone's MAN WITH NO NAME(Clint Eastwood) TRILOGY.

What's especially brilliant about STREETS OF LAREDO is that McMurtry builds up such a grand landscape with so many rich characters in LONESOME DOVE...only to tear apart that terrain, its heroes and its nobility with his sequel. It is a jarring book, for sure. Even though LONESOME DOVE is not without its disturbing & brutal moments, there is a nobility to many of the scenes and characters (which is why it's so well-loved...and will continue to be well-loved for many, many decades). Yet, to make sur that we're not too smitten or swept away by the grandeur of LONESOME DOVE, McMurtry delivered STREETS OF LAREDO as a way of showing us the dark underbelly of the beast that we didn't completely see in LONESOME DOVE. Without Gus riding by Woodrow's side, Captain Call has become every bit as much a shell of a man as Eastwood in the Leone movies (or in UNFORGIVEN). It is not easy to read...and perhaps McMurtry would have left many readers much more happy had he let the LONESOME DOVE saga end with that one book. However, by writing STREETS OF LAREDO McMurty provides the hangover that comes after a night of drunken revalry. It's not an easy read...it strips away the myth & awe that LONESOME DOVE provided to so many...but it is brilliant.

With those two books (LONESOME DOVE and STREETS OF LARED0), McMurty managed to go from conjuring up the spirit of John Ford/Howard Hawks to evoking the demons of Leon/Peckinpah.

In many ways one could draw a parallel to this pair of books to THE GODFATHER and THE GODFATHER PART II. Though both GODFATHER films are brutal, one shows the rise of a glorious America...while the other shows its fall (all through the character of Michael Corleone). McMurtry accomplishes the same with LONESOME DOVE (the more glorious time) and STREETS OF LAREDO (the fall of such glory).

I mean, finding out within the first dozen pages or so that Newt was killed shortly after the story of LONESOME DOVE ends...that pretty much let the reader know from the word "go" that we'd be in for a dark ride with this book.
If LONESOME DOVE...even amidst the betrayals, the murders, the senseless killings, the dirt and the grime...managed to speak to the better angels within us, the STREETS OF LAREDO speaks to our demons. With this in mind, I find these two books to complete and complement one another. STREETS OF LAREDO, by its very dark/dim nature, manages to exalt LONESOME DOVE even more.
While LONESOME DOVE, through its sweeping majesty, manages to make STREETS OF LAREDO all the more disturbing.

As for the other books with Gus & Call...they are entertaining at best... but none of the prequels ever come close to accomplishing the jarring dichotomy that McMurty accomplishes with his pairing of LONESOME DOVE and STREETS OF LAREDO.

So, for those who are disappointed or disturbed by STREETS OF LAREDO...I'd suggest that you put a few CDs of Ennio Morricone's Western Themes on the stereo to play in the background while giving this book another reading. You might find that it's in the same league as LONESOME DOVE itself when read this way.

Streets of Laredo takes place about 15 years after the events in Lonesome Dove. The American West is a different place and Captain Woodrow Call is a different man.

Call, now an old man nearing 70, is hired by the railroad to track down a brutal young outlaw named Joey Garza. Along the way Call also tangles with Mox Mox the manburner (last seen with Blue Duck attempting to burn Lorena alive in Lonesome Dove). We become reacquainted with old friends Pea Eye, Lorena, Clara, and Charles Goodnight, and make some new ones: Brookshire, the accountant for the railroad from New York City; Famous Shoes, the best tracker alive; and Maria, the plucky mother of Joey Garza himself. We even run into Judge Roy Bean and John Wesley Hardin. The West is changing, but brutal men still run free and must be brought to justice in the face of encroaching progress and the never ending march of time.

Larry McMurtry never lets us forget that the old west was a brutal, unforgiving, messy, and often terrifying place with no room for sentiment. Call, representing the old guard, is arthritic with failing eyesight, but is still plenty tough and wily. Garza, representing the new, has the advantage of youth and technology (a fine German rifle with a telescopic sight) as he robs trains bringing civilization to the wild land. The result is an epic struggle that makes for a very fitting, satisfying sequel to Lonesome Dove and a terrific read.

I was up past 1AM several nights in a row, unable to put Streets of Laredo down. If you enjoyed Lonesome Dove, you owe it to yourself to finish the story here with Streets of Laredo.

As an interesting aside, Larry McMurtry based his legendary characters Captain Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae on real-life friends and legendary cattle men Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, who drove their herds north from Texas to the railroads after the Civil War along what became known as the Goodnight-Loving Trail. Goodnight also invented the chuck wagon for these drives. Goodnight himself appears in all four of the Lonesome Dove books, but has the largest presence here.

I came onto the series a little late and I loved Lonesome Dove. I could not wait to read this book. Well, that was then. This was the biggest piece of garbage. I had heard rumors that McMurtry was angry over Return to Lonesome Dove (Who wouldn't be angry?), but he was bitter and this book 100% shows that! He did a hatchet job on Lonesome Dove in this book. The names may be the same, but the characters are not! He did not stop there, he killed off characters his fans rooted for and loved out of spite and it shows. I couldn't even make it through the whole book. I ended up throwing it in the goodwill box after a few chapters. This is a good example of what not to do when you are bitter and irrational. If he would have just written this book like that stupid made for tv sequel never happened his fans would have been thrilled. Don't read this book if you loved Lonesome Dove, this book will be a total disappointment.

For a Spoiler-Free Review:
(Note: "Streets of Laredo is the sequel to Lonesome Dove." In addition there are "2 prequels" - "Dead Man's Walk" and "Comanche Moon") "Streets of Laredo" while probably not the classic that "Lonesome Dove" was (but that would be a tough act to follow!) is certainly a page-turner and a near-classic in it's own right! The book mainly revolves around the characters of Dish, Lorraine, and Captain Call from "Lonesome Dove," but the reader is also caught up with all of the characters from "Dove" throughout the novel. (at least those still living at the end of "Dove")

Though "Laredo" is a sequel to Lonesome Dove...I personally read it a number of years after reading/watching "Dove" and didn't compare it all that much to it. Rather, I judged it more as a novel in it's own right just with some of the same characters I already knew. I think this added to my enjoyment of it. Afterall, "Streets of Laredo" is set more than 15 years after "Dove". I actually started this book and got through a few chapters, and then was inspired to pick it back up after watching the movie "No Country for Old Men" as I felt "No Country" was also an old western-style "life is cheap" story that left me wanting more - and this book was definitely a good place to come for that!

An aging Captain Call is one of the primary characters, who is a great character as established in "Lonesome Dove." Part of my enjoyment of this book was I felt I could hear in my head exactly how Call would deliver all of his lines (which is probably a testament to Tommy Lee Jones' great acting in the mini-series "Lonesome Dove"). At the outset of this novel, it is clear that the 70-year old Call is in the twilight of his long career, and his finest days are long behind him. As with most of McMurtry's works, there is also strong characterization of all of the other characters...in fact, while the novel flows well from cover to cover the various characters introduced and their back stories at times perhaps swerve or slow the momentum of the story. But characterization and back stories are a hallmark of Mr. McMurtry, and despite that this page-turner still leaves the reader anticipating what will happen next and how the various storylines will converge to the climax.

While some may question the plot twists and turns of the story, I consider it very good story-telling about the twilight of old gunfighter's careers...and perhaps the twilight of the legendry "Old West" itself. (As others have described McMurtry's works, they represent a celebration of the "passing of the old west.") I also personaly find appealing stories that feature aging heroes and their struggles to come to terms with it...or perhaps not come to terms with it. While I understand some of the points of criticism, I personally enjoyed the unpredictability of the plot and thought the whole thing was a great ride - start to finish! (I would add that you may want to avoid some other reviews that provide pretty major plot spoilers!! There's one or two fairly recent ones that provide blatant spoilers to the closing chapters of the book). Further, I don't recommend one reads other reviews or synopsis to find out what happens to the characters......read it yourself as you may thoroughly enjoy the ride too! Although I gave it 4 of 5 stars, I agreed more with the reviewers who gave it 5 stars - as a classic in its own right - as opposed to those who I believe erred in the manner in which they unfavorably compared it to "Dove." "Streets of Laredo" once gain proves no one weaves a western like McMurtry.

The plot of STREETS OF LAREDO seems simple enough. Captain Woodrow Call, bounty hunter extraordinaire, is hired by Colonel Terry, the president of a railroad, to capture train robber and serial killer, Joey Garza. But there are enough twists and turns in Larry McMurtry's novel to turn a simple situation into a complex, risky adventure where both laws and human endurance are stretched to the limit, and often broken.

From the start, Call's quest is filled with obstacles. His colleague, Pea Eye Parker, refuses to join him on the hunt for the first time in years. Like Call, Pea Eye, is getting old and isn't sure he's up to another hunt, especially one that will take him far away from his wife and their five children. Call is also accompanied by Colonel Terry's New York accountant, Ned Bookshire, a man who knows he's out of his depth in the rugged west, but who must accompany Call to keep track of expenses for the Colonel, or else lose his job. From there, things get worse, especially when more than one serial killer arrives in the area to cause trouble.

I've never read a Larry McMurtry novel before, and although I'm told STREETS OF LAREDO is a sequel to LONESOME DOVE, this novel stands well on its own, despite occasional references to the past. Especially interesting was McMurtry's use of back story to provide intriguing and useful details about main characters and a few secondary characters. I have to admit that some back stories were too long. Also, while POV changed often and smoothly, nearly every character used the word "foolish" to describe their past mistakes. By the time Joe Garza reflects on his "foolish" mistakes, I'm wishing McMurtry had kept a thesaurus nearby while writing. Still, McMurtry's talent for detail, narrative description, and riveting storytelling made this novel a great read.

Well, it's true, what others say about the almost unbelievable brutality of too many of the characters in this sequel. And some of them are downright moronic. These are just window dressing, though, bit players to round out the meanness of hardscrabble living. I had an insight into Joey Garza and his mother. As a child Joey was universally thought to be likable, only to turn into the killing, soulless monster he became as an adult. He is obsessed with his mother being, in his opinion, a whore for her five (was it five?) marriages. He himself has no interest in sex with girls. At the other extreme, his mother Maria takes any ill treatment from him, even his attempts to murder his siblings, and still seeks to protect him. I think Larry McMurtry has put over an Oedipus attachment--unfulfilled-- on his readers in this.

The ending of the Lonesome Dove series is easily the saddest, most depressing, most tragedy-infested novel in the quartet. Tracing the twilight years of Captain Woodrow Call and the Old West as a whole, this novel takes Call in pursuit of a deadly train robber named Joey Garza. Garza has had extraordinary success in robbing trains, and a firm in the east has hired Call to bring this Mexican teenager to justice. Many of the "old gang" from past books are here, including Lorena and Pea Eye, now married and farming the windswept Texas Panhandle, but inexplicably, McMurtry reveals that so many of the beloved figures from past books have met horrible ends in the fifteen or so years since the conclusion of Lonesome Dove. Call's son Newt died in a fall from the fierce mare his father gave him at the end of Lonesome Dove, and I won't even begin to get into all the sad deaths among the characters up in Nebraska. I guess it comes down to the fact that no matter how beloved and respected the individuals in Lonesome Dove and the other volumes in this series were, this is of course a multi-volume work of fiction and the author is free to abuse and misuse his characters in any way he sees fit, because they belong to him, not us. I've known at least one friend of mine to say he wish he'd never read this book because it degraded the greatness in the cast of Lonesome Dove, and it's almost impossible to separate this work from that one and not compare the two. Streets of Laredo, (yes, named from that sad old cowboy ballad covered so beautifully by Johnny Cash) is a gritty, hard-hitting, visceral novel that delivers but it also wretches away something from the greatness Call once possessed, and it takes its tragic underthemes too far.

This is my second favorite of the four "Lonesome Dove" tales. I liked "Commanche Moon" almost as much, with "Dead Man's Walk" trailing the pack because it went a little too overboard with believeability. As there is a gap between "Dove" and this, there is in theory another possibility for another saga, but let's not hold our breath on that one.
This one shows the last great adventure of Woodrow Call. We see how the man has aged, and how he is realizing he has aged. But there is still a lot of fire in him, and more important, a sense of duty that has been driving him all his life. Even though one can argue that he should have hung up his guns long ago, he shows the determination, as well as the ability, to focus on a task until it is completed. Even in this book, where he's often outnumbered, he plods on to get the job done. That's what heroes are made of, folks.
You know there's going to be a lot of gore in a McMurtry western, and for those fans of it, you get a lot here. For there is not only one, but two different serial killers in the story, and both are as bad as bad can be. In fact, with McMurtry's propensity for characters who torture as sport, it will be hard for him to come up with one worse than Mox Mox, who burns children for fun. Be warned in advance if this is not your cup of tea.
We also get to hear what happened to the survivors of "Lonesome Dove", and when "Streets of Laredo" is done, you will see what happens to the ones that survive this one. Of course I won't reveal this, but if you've gotta know this stuff, you've got to read this book.

What readers don't seem to realize is that McMurtry was really surprised by the popularity of Lonesome Dove--he had intended to show how awful (misogynistic, racist, cruel, etc.) the West was back then, but no one seemed to get it. So he wrote Streets Of Laredo to drive the point home more clearly (you can find interviews with him online that will back me up). I knew this ahead of time and read this one with a grain of salt, considering it a sort of Western American Psycho.

The first book of Larry McMurtry's I ever read was Lonesome Dove. That book enthralled me, making me wish he would re-visit the characters with a sequel. Eventually he did and "Streets of Laredo" is the result. The problem here is that you really can't read Streets as a sequel to Lonesome Dove, because if you do you will be extremely disappointed. The characters have changed so completely that they don't seem like the same people. If you can get over that hurdle then this becomes an exciting (if not rather violent) story based on the old west.
The book starts off on the premise that the cattle ranch in Montana failed, and Captain Woodrow Call has returned to Texas as a sort of bounty hunter. Other main characters from Lonesome Dove include Pea Eye, his loyal helper, and Lorena, the whore from Lonesome who is now a school teacher and wife of Pea Eye. (Does anyone else think this is just too much of a stretch for these characters?) Call has been hired by a railroad tycoon to stop a mexican bandit from constantly robbing his trains. Along the way we meet old friends from Lonesome, and famous historical persons (Judge Roy Bean, John Wesley Harding, etc). The action is extremely exciting, the suspense riviting, and McMurtry's style of writing keeps the reader on the edge of their seat. As with a lot of his writing McMurtry describes the violence in VERY strong detail. This seems to be done to help the reader climb into the story and experience the situations. Very well done but also very disturbing. As we draw near to the end the ending comes out of no where and surprises you. The eventual hero is not who you would expect.
Overall, this epic story is a blast to read. Again do not get caught up in the "sequel" thing, you MUST read this for it's own sake. I would recommend this for anyone who enjoys epic westerns, and for anyone who loves McMurtry's writings.

Streets of Laredo is an interesting and engaging book, but too long. McMurtry repeats himself such as the times when Joey Garza keeps thinking that he is going to his mother's house to ahve his wounds cleaned. Other characters' thoughts are also repeated unnecessarily. This makes a long story even longer.
Yet the characters of this novel are interesting. Joey Garza's hatred of Maria, his mother, is left unfinished. The reader knows his attiude is inocrrect, but Joey never realizes it. Also how he became bad is left to the reader's imagination.
Minor characters appear in this book, who require circumstances. Doobie Plunkert appears as a rash, immature girl. Yet she will have some relationship to the story toward the end as her husband Deputy Plunkert roams Texas with Woodrow Call and his posse. The story of this couple and that of the accountant Brookshire and his wife Katie seem to serve as reminders that people live and die and are promptly forgotten. Perhaps also this is McMurtry's way of showing how relentless the brutality was in the developing west.
The impact of all these deaths was depressing.
Despite some of these problems Streets of Laredo continued where Lonesome Dove left off. I wish McMurtry had not killed all those people in the former book. It would have been nice to have seen Newt again.

No book compares with Lonesome Dove, but few sequels are as good as this one. Forget both prequels, they're dreadful. But you have to like the cast here--Ned Brookshire, a Jerseyite (as I am,) Teresa, a blind person (as I am,) and nearly-blind Billy Williams are just 3 of the many. Brookshire is shoved into a job he doesn't want, by a boss he rightfully hates, and stuck on a journey to nowhere with the misanthropic Call, who hasn't mellowed a bit since Lonesome Dove, when he wouldn't even claim his own son. Again, McMurtry creates a villain, Joey Garza, just as evil and twice as clever as Blue Duck, and arms him with the best weapon an 1890's bad man could ask for. For once, McMurtry doesn't gift a blind person with super powers, which we don't have. At least he doesn't manage to get her killed, as Stephen King did with the blind child in "The Langoliers." All in all, this is a very worthwhile read, as was "Last Picture Show." I only wish more of McMurtry's work was up to his 3 best.

I really enjoyed this book, especially in how it contrasted with "Lonesome Dove". As a sequel, it really breaks from any expected pathways (set up by the end of last book) and takes off into its own uncharted territory. Just when you think things will go one way, it goes another. There is a bit of bittersweetness with one of the themes - the end of the Old West. The story progresses with the feel almost like in "The Shootist".

The book is much darker, especially without Gus McCrae, but the story-line manages to bring him into the picture by the contrasts between him and Call. Overall, this theme is well done. Looking back to the first three books (Dead Man's Walk, Comanche Moon, and Lonesome Dove), one can see the line of development that has brought the (remaining) characters to this point. The story ends here - satisfying if not quite what you expect.

"Streets of Laredo" is the much-anticipated sequel to Larry McMurtry's finest and most memorable novel, "Lonesome Dove." Because of the quality of the first novel, which ranks among this reader's favorites, almost any follow-up would be disappointing as "Lonesome Dove" is a book that few readers will forget. "Streets of Laredo" suffers from the fact that Gus McCrae, one of the two cantankerous and aging cowboys from "Lonesome Dove", is not present in this book. The repartee and interaction between the voluble McCrae and the taciturn, curmudgeonly Call was one of the great strengths of the first novel and now, in "Streets of Laredo", Call, the less colorful of the duo is at the center of the story. He is hired to track down a Mexican bandit, Joey Garza and along with an Eastern "tenderfoot", a hapless deputy sheriff and "Pea Eye" Parker, one of the secondary characters from "Lonesome Dove", he pursues the bandit across the windswept panhandle, through the hardscrabble Pecos country and into Mexico. McMurtry populates the Streets of Laredo with real life characters drawn from western history including the prolific killer John Wesley Hardin, the cattleman and trailblazer, Charles Goodnight and the colorful Judge Roy Bean who set himself up as "The Law West of the Pecos." In "Streets of Laredo" Woodrow Call is an aging man, not destined for more adventures and so the awkward "Pea Eye" Parker, who is now a husband and a father, married to the beautiful and good hearted whore Lorena, is elevated to a major character, torn between the pull of home and hearth and duty to his comrades. Like most of McMurtry's books about the historic west, this novel is brutal, full of violent deaths. However, it also features strong and beautifully written female characters as the author understands that the plains were not settled by the feint of heart, that it took bold men and resourceful, strong women to tame a wild country. "Streets of Laredo" does not measure up to the preceding "Lonesome Dove" but it is a fine book nonetheless, with a straightforward narrative drive that provides the reader with a compelling and haunting tale of love, loss, duty, pain, and ultimately, redemption.

We beat the drum lowly and shook the spurs slowly,

And bitterly wept as we bore him along;

For we all loved our comrade, so brave and so handsome,

We all loved our comrade, although he's done wrong...

From "Streets of Laredo"

Perhaps the saddest old cowboy song, written about 1860

I enjoyed this sequel to Lonesome Dove, even if it seems much of this book may have been inspired by McMurtry's anger at CBS TV's miniseries sequel, Return to Lonesome Dove. When CBS purchased the rights to Lonesome Dove, McMurtry retained the right to use his own characters again in his own sequel. Apparently, McMurtry didnt like what CBS did, since his take is completely different.
For that matter, this is a very different book from Lonesome Dove, too. The characters, while familiar, have grown and aged and changed a great deal. Pea-Eye, especially, seems to have become a completely different person. Lorena, too, has transformed over the years to become more like the Clara of Lonesome Dove, than the young ex-prostitute of the earlier novel.
There are problems of continuity that dont bear much thinking about. Faulkner used to say he couldn't always keep his characters straight from book to book either, but he preferred to believe that as he got older he LEARNED more about them. I think thats a good way to describe McMurtry's development between books.
The best way to describe this novel, then, might be familiar, yet DIFFERENT!

Orson Welles said that and it's true. Everybody's story, eventually, ends with at least some degree of unhappiness, and there's unhappiness galore in the completion of Woodrow Call's tale.

I would almost aruge that "Streets" isn't even a proper sequel to "Dove" at all, but an epilogue. It's a big story yet it lacks the epic, decades-spanning sprawl of the other novels, and the focus is on finality and closure.

It's bleak, cold and a surprisingly angry book. "Dove" had its share of harshness, and didn't exactly end on a pleasant note, but "Streets" is worlds away from its predecessor in terms of violence, savagery and fatalism.

Here, we find Call on the edge of 70, no longer the legendary dynamo that led the Montano cattle drive. Now he's aged into his size and is consistently underestimated by almost every one he meets. Arthritis makes his knuckles swell to the point he has to remove the trigger guard from his rifle in order to use it and McMurtry almost seems to relish ladling indignities on one of his most beloved creations. Perspective gained at a point too late to use is a phenomenon as sad as it is common.

But to stop navel gazing for a second, this is a book crammed with excellent characters: the trainrobber, Joey Garza, is a great and horrifying character (it's a little disconcerting to discover that someone like this could actually wander out of McMurtry's imagination); McMurtry also gets good mileage out of John Wesley Hardin, Charles Goodnight, Maria Garza and my favorite figure in the entire series, the Kickapoo tracker, Famous Shoes. And Crow Town is one of the most vividly imagined settings I've encountered in a book in years.

This is also a novel dappled with great scenes, particularly Call's confrontation with the hard sheriff; the opening introduction of Brookshire; and especially Maria's pilgrimage across the frozen Pecos with the whores, which is some of the finest storytelling McMurtry has ever put across.

As I said, happy endings depend on where you stop your story. Fans of "Dove" and Call and Clara and Pea Eye and Lorena may well wish to stop with that book's ending, rather than wander into this terrain, which is harsh and unforgiving and, for some characters, final.

I love Larry McMurtry. That's not to say I agree with everything he does with his characters, but I do enjoy his work for the most part. Streets of Laredo is a good book, but I was a little disappointed with it. I have heard arguments about why Lorena and Pea Eye shouldn't be married, but to me that works. I knew the ending of this book wouldn't be happily ever after, because Woodrow Call is old, and it's apparent he has to be put to rest, so to speak, for the series to end. But the explanations of what happened to the rest of the Hat Creek gang just didn't set well with me. Newt killed by his own horse? Dish, the top cow hand, running a store?! I was disappointed in what happened to the characters McMurtry didn't seem to want to deal with anymore, and I will admit to being shocked by Newt's fate. Anyone who has read the other books in the series will understand why. But all in all, this is a good book. I found it easy to read, and these days that can be rare. I highly recommend this book to those who have read the other three books in the series. If you have not yet read them, pick them up first; read them in order, or else you'll find yourself re-reading them.

This was a good book. Over the years since Lonesome Dove's release I have read Comanche Moon and Dead Man's Walk but never wanted to read Streets of Laredo because my wife didn't like it though she never told me why other then she didn't think Pea Eye would marry Lorena. I had read a few reviews and found they didn't like the book either for whatever reason. The primary reason I skipped this book was because I had envisioned how things got along in my mind and didn't want that upset by of all people the author of the series.

I received Streets of Laredo as an audiobook gift so it was time to listen up.

There were parts I absolutely could not stand and those were the times McMurtry was repetitive. He must have written 20 times Maria this and Maria that and she was merely the worst case. He did it with almost all the characters. Just terrible.

I can't tell if ole Larry thinks he is a woman, wants to be a woman or just wants to show all us guys that he knows women. It has to be one of the three unless he isn't writing those parts but his woman is. It is also possible Larry doesn't like women. They all get killed, almost killed, raped or any combination. That's not only so in this book. Even Clara gets the axe here.

The story without the distractions is quite good. I decided it isn't for me to determine how everyone gets along after "...Hell of a vision." That's Larry's job and if he would have left out 20% of the repetitive mumbo jumbo I think this book would have been better received.

In conclusion, I'd bet Larry didn't want to do no more Lonesome Dove stories so he made that possible.

I recommend this book because there is a real good story in there.

Streets of Laredo has much the same feel as Lonesome Dove. No its not as good but the feel of the writing is much the same. Larry McMurtry's use of poetic narrative is one of the best. He has a way of hopping from character to character's head and at the same time keeping the story going. I thought about giving this 4 stars because Lonesome Dove but the way things are rated on the store, 4 stars is a bit low. I would say its better than 4 stars but maybe not 5. Its much better than Comanche Moon which leaves you waiting for something to happen most of the book. I think prequels are very difficult to pull off because the writer is tied down to too many predetermined outcomes. This of course is not a prequel which frees McMurtry to shape the plot as he sees fit.

I must say I enjoyed reading Streets of Laredo. I recently read Lonesome Dove (one of my favorites) and was hoping for a repeat performance. I suppose with a book as outstanding as LD, a repeat is a tall drink to get down. But here I am, doing what every other reviewer on this list is doing: comparing the book to LD. If you do that then everyone will consider it a disappointment....LD was a masterpiece. I wish people wouldnt strike it for not being the same book as LD was. If I had never read LD before I would rate this a 4 star. I bet that most of the ratings given by others would be a bit higher if they had never read LD. The book blends fictional characters and real life westerners. Violence is widespread but in that era, that was the case. I especially love the way McMurtry weaves the stories of of the different characters together.
My big criticism is there is no good understanding of the root of Joey Garza's evil. Also the possiblity of Lorena marrying Pea Eye seems so remote, further description of her feelings towards him are needed to make it more believable.
Overall, the book was an enjoyable read. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys a western. For those of you who have not read McMurtry yet, start with Lonesome Dove. That is the best.

How can you compete with Lonesome Dove? Not as good as its predecessor, but still an entertaining read. McMurtry dwells into the mind of the "bad guys" a little more with this one. My only complaint of the book was the "bad guys" and their psychotic tendencies. Sometimes felt the character profiles of the men Call is sent to kill are made for a better story rather than for a realistic read. Of course, it is fiction. ;)
If you're a fan of the Lonesome Dove series, you will enjoy Streets of Laredo. It's not a disappointment. It's amazing how McMurtry manages to kill off everyone you like (You'll have to read the book to see who doesn't make it from the last page of Lonesome Dove to the first page of Streets of Laredo.) and still write an enjoyable novel.
By the way, don't bother with the onscreen version. Read this book and you'll see why James Garner as Captain Call is a HORRIBLE casting job.

Like everyone else who picked it up, I absolutely loved "Lonesome Dove". There's not much I can say about that novel that hasn't been said many, many times over the years. Unsurprisingly, as soon as I finished it, I couldn't wait to continue the series with "Streets of Laredo". Obviously, the sequel probably wouldn't quite measure up to its predecessor, as they rarely do, but that doesn't mean it would be a bad book by any stretch, right? Wrong.

"Streets of Laredo" isn't simply a case of a sequel falling short of its predecessor; "Streets of Laredo" is a bad book even taken on its own terms. This book is ugly, bitter, bordering on nihilistic, and simply depressing to read. It's bad enough that it follows "Lonesome Dove," a joyous and heroic book, but even if "Streets of Laredo" was a completely independent work, there would be little to recommend it. I don't know what the circumstances behind the writing of this book were. I have no idea if McMurtry was made to write it against his will, if he was going through personal troubles, or if there were even any extraordinary circumstances at all to affected his writing. For whatever reason, McMurtry's writing in this novel has a very angry edge to it.

Generally speaking, I have no problem with dark stories or violence in fiction. However, there is a difference between purposeully-handled violence that is necessary to the story and its themes, and gratuitous violence that is simply on display to disgust or shock. "Lonesome Dove" had plenty of violence and death, much of it quite explicit, but never did it feel excessive. "Streets of Laredo," on the other hand, is filled with scene after scene of brutality. Others have pointed out this aspect of the book, along with many specific examples, but it is hard to overstate how awful it is. Everything from rape to lynching to child abuse to man-burning to countless acts of senseless animal cruelty is on display here, most of it with no discernible purpose other than to disturb the reader.

It's clear within just a few chapters that McMurtry seems hell-bent on punishing both the reader and the characters they grew to love so dearly in "Lonesome Dove". The fates of several main characters from that novel are so casually dealt with in literally a few sentences in such a shocking, off-putting way that it's actually insulting. Those lucky enough to survive are dealt further injustices throughout the book, from physical punishment to unlikely plot and character developments. I generally believe authors can do whatever they want to with their own creations, but "Streets of Laredo" is enough to make me rethink that sentiment. For example, the idea of Pea Eye and Lorena getting married is absurd to anyone who just finished "Lonesome Dove," and unfortunately, their relationship doesn't seem any more likely or realistic even after finishing "Streets of Laredo." Even Captain Call - never my personal favorite character in the series, but a good one nonetheless - isn't immune to such punishment, as McMurtry piles on the physical and emotional abuse so heavily it crosses the line into dramaturgical cruelty. McMurtry's need to make his characters suffer is so extreme that the reader eventually ceases to be affected by it. When a major character from "Lonesome Dove" meets their end on (literally) the third-to-last page, I nearly laughed out loud; not because the death was funny, but because McMurtry's endless string of hardships inflicted onto the characters had not only ceased to be meaningful, but had entered into absurdity, even parody.

The novel isn't a complete disaster; McMurtry's writing is still smooth and effortlessly readable, and there are several scenes of tension and excitement. However, even McMurtry's skilled writing isn't enough to save this near-total misfire of a book. I have yet to read "Dead Man's Walk" or "Comanche Moon," and though I intend to, it is only because I know that there is not much more that McMurtry can do to the characters, seeing as how they are prequels, and we now know how their stories end. Unless you plan to become a "Lonesome Dove" completist, I'd recommend the casual reader simply stick with that novel. "Streets of Laredo" will simply leave a bad taste in your mouth.

I really struggled on what to give this book - the writing was good and the story was entertaining, but it just didn't read like a sequel to Lonesome Dove. I read somewhere that McMurty actually wrote Streets of Laredo as a screenplay in the early 80's and decided to publish it as a sequel to Lonesome Dove after all the accolades the novel received. That would explain a lot, as the characters just seemed very "different" from their Lonesome Dove selves and anyone from Dove that couldn't be conveniently written into Streets are dispatched with mere sentences. So all in all this read less like a sequel and more like a totally independent book. This isn't bad, per se, but I only bought Streets bc it was the sequel

The novel itself was entertaining enough – a gritty good vs. bad guys western buoyed by McMurtry's simple, flowing prose. It's a decent book, but not a must read.

I was fortunate enough to read STREETS OF LAREDO before I read LD. I didn't have that built-in "bias" of hoping beyond hope that McMurtry would offer a sequel as mesmerizing as his Pulitizer-prize winning masterpiece--a bias that seems to have disappointed so many of the reviewers on this site who can't help but compare the two books.
Fact is, this is a gripping, brutal Western. STREETS OF LAREDO gives the reader a vast array of complex, interesting characters: Woodrow F. Call, the aging former lawman turned bounty hunter, who realizes he is well past his prime...Pea Eye Parker, torn between his devotion to his family and his undying loyalty to Call...Lorena Parker, once a prostitute, now a wife, mother, and schoolteacher, who sets out in the face of overwhelming danger to find her husband...Mr. Brookshire, a railroad accountant from New York and traveling companion of Call, who is appalled at the brutality of the West...Maria, whose hatred of Call and concern for her killer son cannot overcome a true heart of gold. Throw in two chilling, ruthless killers--Joey Garza and Mox Mox, the "manburner"--and you've got a story that keeps the reader busily turning pages.
This is a hardhitting, well-written account of the Old West in the last gasp of the 19th century. The book stands alone on its own merits.

<<spoilers>>

this is a commentary on what I've read in other reviews here and what I felt about the book. I didn't have a problem with the Lorena Pea-Eye relationship, I thought it was believable enough, considering Lorena's history and problems with men, although Pea-Eye's age if he had been a ranger for 20 or 30 years makes his fathering 5 & later 6 children unrealistic. The way McMurtry throws away Newt & July Johnson is bizarre, but kind of amusing. You are warned from the getgo that this will not be a sentimental story. I didn't really have a problem with the Garza character, though the way he killed his stepfather was over the top. The Hardin character's lines were well-written, I enjoyed the crow-town scenes. Mox-mox who I thought was a very minor unimpressive character in Lonesome Dove is suddenly a major force to be taken seriously in this story, but I was still unimpressed. I found the Maria character's devotion to her nearly pure evil son to be ultimately unconvincing considering she had two other kids to be concerned for. Her final confrontation with Joey was particularly unsatisfying, she took the moment to feel proud of her daughter's resistance to being drowned by her brother. I mean what kind of crap is that, she should have been simply horrified and shot the bastard, but no that would have been too easy. McMurtry has a real habit of killing off his characters in Lonesome Dove & this story, and by the end of the story he's literally running out of people to kill, it's truly unbelievable how quick he is to have his characters meet gruesome fates. I actually laughed when he killed Brookshire, whose wife was also dead, along with the deputy and his wife, at that point the deadly nature of being a McMurtry character had become a joke. For me the most unsatisfying part of Call's ordeal at the end was the first shot being left in his midsection. Obviously he wasn't going to be a very happy guy with a lead ball next to his heart. McMurtry didn't have to make Call's ending so harsh, even minus an arm and leg he might have been able to come around a bit, but I think the bullet stuck in his body kind of finished off his hope. Also he should have had more money saved away after his long career, not to mention more people willing to help him out, all the talk about Lorena taking out loans to make him a little shack and whatnot were a bit ridiculous. Another annoying thing was the geography of the land, all roads seemed to lead to Maria's little hut in some pissant village in Mexico, and that lack of imagination on the part of the author and his characters was a bit much. & yet I still give this 4 stars because it's just a story and I enjoyed reading it, read it less than a week I think, so I give credit to the masterstoryteller author for making me care about his book enough to write this "review".

I found this book to be a huge let down. How can you follow up a Pulitzer Prize winner without some disappointment? He should have left it alone. The characters were flat. The story line poorly planned out. The relationships unbelievable. Everyone had either died off or married someone that they should never had a chance with (ex. Pea Eye marries Lori. In the first book she hated Pea, and he was so dumb.) Lonesome Dove was fantastic, while this book did it no justice at all. I wish I had never read it b/c the way it played out was not the way I saw things happening.

Alright, it's not as good as LONESOME DOVE. That was the first book of the series I read, and it was so brilliant and entertaining, that I almost didn't want to read more and spoil it. But I gave in to temptation, and I'm glad I did. Warning, though...if you thought there were depressing things in DOVE, watch out for this one! Lots of characters die...in fact, lots of memorable characters from LD are already dead when STREETS begins. But you have to accept that sort of thing from McMurtry. His plots, just like life, do what they want to, and no preference from the reader will change that. A feeling of dread hangs over this book, particularly whether Pea Eye and Lorena will ever reunite happily. Jeez, I couldn't read this thing fast enought to see what happened next, and in my opinion, that's about the best praise you can give a book. I've never liked westerns, but thank God I plunged into these. STREETS is not has funny as LD was in parts, but otherwise, it is a very, very worthy sequel.

First let me say I loved Lonesome Dove. I believe it's one of the best novels ever written. This, on the other hand, is far from it. All the things that made Lonesome Dove so great just aren't present here. The lyricism, the poetry, the sense of wonder are gone. Those things and all the interesting characters. This isn't giving anything away but almost all the interesting surviving character from Lonesome Dove dies before Streets of Laredo even begins. The few left are the ones that don't talk much. They have nothing interesting to say and very little interesting to do other than suffer. I'm not particularly interested in watching people suffer. Reading about it either. The first part of this book just recounts how everyone died in the intervening time. And that's the fun part. It gets worse from there, much worse. I've never been more happy to end a book.

I generally dislike sequels in books as well as movies, so picked up Larry McMurtry's "Streets of Laredo," the sequel to his "Lonesome Dove," with a negative bias. I picked the book out hastily to read by tent light on a camping trip. I almost put the book down after the first few pages, when the familiar characters of "Lonesome Dove" were recalled (the ones who died) or described as they appeared 20 years later. My image of the characters was seared in mind by the superb television multi-part movie, starring Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Dianne Lane, and others. Thankfully, I stuck with the book. Somewhere around page 15, I was caught up in the story and after that, put the book down only when necessary, to eat or sleep. McMurtry is a true story-teller. His use of language is simple - no William Penn Warren or James Dickey here. He has the occasionally annoying habit of saying the same thing 3 times - makes you wonder if you're imagining things. None of McMurtry's stylistic quirks stand in the way of the story. He makes you want to know what happens next. His characters don't have great depth, so while you may not care about them in an emotional way, you care because their fortunes are a necessary part of the action. "Streets of Laredo" is better appreciated if "Lonesome Dove" is read first, or at least the T.V. mini-series is watched (the acting was so good that the television characters were more satisfying than the book characters). "Streets of Laredo" may not be great literature, but there is a reason Larry McMurty has sold millions of books. The book is fun to read.

As Lonesome Dove, Streets of Laredo slowly pulls the reader in. I, like many, love LD (read it, then years later re-read it). A year passed since my last re-reading and as I read SofL, I was swept away in a very different manner. For me it's wildly successful in transporting the reader to a unique space and place in US history with vivid characters and a truly gripping narrative arc. Not for the feint-hearted, but a tremendous read. I think this novel can stand alone, without even having read LD. Makes me want to continue reading McMurtry.

McMurtry shows us that not all sequels leave you unsatisfied. "Streets of Laredo" is an excellent book that shows a hero in his old age. It is both bittersweet and thrilling at the same time. We see Woodrow Call in his post-Gus McCrae days, taking on a bandit many years his junior. We see Pea Eye Parker, an unexpected choice for the last great Hat Creek member to follow Call, fighting his impulse to go on one last job with the captain. We see fear and hatred and loneliness and loss, and each emotion is conveyed in McMurtry's masterful way.
McMurtry adds a special note of realism by using actual historical figures--John Wesley Hardin, often called the West's most prolific killer, Charlie Goodnight, one of the great cowboys, and Judge Roy Bean, the hanging judge, the Law West of the Pecos. He weaves these people with his fictional characters like Pea, the Captain, and Ned Brookshire to make a very effective and entrancing novel.
"Streets of Laredo" is at times violent, amusing, depressing, and at all times interesting. A fine novel, and worthy of its predecessor, "Lonesome Dove." You can't go wrong with this one.

Streets of Laredo, set in Texas and Mexico in more or less the 1890's, is the sequel to Lonesome Dove. Anyone who's read the author's other work will know that his novels are a progression of character deaths, often pointless and cruel. This one was even more depressing than that.
Use of language in this book is generally evocative, but occasionally, particularly in the section from Doobie's perspective, becomes downright simple-minded and annoying. There are a lot of repeated phrases.
Characterization is excellent, sort of. The reader gets to know the characters. The reader gets to care about the characters. Then the characters mostly die, or worse. It's a bummer.
The plot involves a manhunt for various different brutal outlaws. It's about the end of Captain Call's career, and the ongoing story of Pea Eye and Lorena, now married with a large family. Secondary characters include the return of Mox Mox, the various men involved in Call's manhunt, the outlaw Garza's downtrodden yet plucky mother Maria, and fictionalized versions of John Wesley Hardin and Charles Goodnight. Mostly it's exciting and fast-moving, but there are some annoying tangents -- Maria running off to deliver a baby right at a climactic moment especially frustrated me.
One unbelievable element of the plot was the amateur amputations and terrible wounds suffered by the characters -- without cauterization, ligature, tourniquets, or anything else. Realistically, the amputee in particular should have bled to death in minutes.
The end, however, I did not enjoy. The whole thing with the little blind girl was sentimental and frankly creepy. The main character's downfall seemed like an act of pointless cruelty on the author's fault -- I wondered if it was meant to be fate, some kind of karmic punishment for deeds done (or more, not done) in earlier volumes. I still didn't enjoy reading it.
The title, taken from a sad traditional ballad about a dying cowboy, seems appropriate here. In many ways this is a well-written book, but there are things in it I wish I hadn't read. Take your chances.

I recently enjoyed "Lonesome Dove" on audiobook, having previously read nothing by McMurtry and with the pre-concieved notion that it was just a corny romance set in the wild west. Those of you that have read it know, as I learned, that the book is far more than that. It instantly became my favorite, or close-second-favorite, book of all time. Once through LD, with the knowledge that McMurtry had written three other parts to the LD "saga", I knew I could not resist reading the others, even though I agree that sequels, particularly in literature as opposed to film, almost always fail to do justice to the original work.

"Streets of Laredo" not only does justice to it's predecessor, keeping true to its characters and themes, but builds on those elements and adds to them, giving the reader a satisfying resolution to the LD story, as well as an entirely original adventure and beautifully sad story to boot.

McMurtry brilliantly dispenses the fate of some of the main characters from LD within the first thirty or so pages, essentially letting those readers who tuned in for nothing more than to simply find out what happens to Call, Newt, Lorena, July and "the gang" know that that is not this book's purpose and they can tune out if that's all they were looking for.

"Streets of Laredo" is the conclusion of the story of Woodrow Call. It's also a story about family and, more specifically, about motherhood; the love and loyalty that a mother is capable of, the anguish that a mother can feel and the lengths she'll go to to protect her family. In the characters of Lorena and Maria, McMurtry depicts women who, when the safety and happiness of their families are threatened, show determination and strength of character equal to, or even surpassing, that of Gus and Call themselves.

On the lighter, but equally satisfying, side, "Streets of Laredo", like LD, is a great adventure story of the wild west, complete with manhunts, train robbers and bandits, legendary outlaws and lawmen, shootouts, chases on horseback, good guys and bad guys. McMurtry weaves a classic adventure story together with a character driven tragedy like no other I've read.

It's also worth mentioning, though technically a sequel, this book works entirely on its own and you wouldn't miss a beat if you read this one without having read "Lonesome Dove", though I'd personally recommend reading that classic first.

Even if it doesn't surpass the grandness and scope of Lonesome Dove (after all, how could it?), "Streets of Laredo" stands on its own as a great novel on every level and McMurtry is one of the great American writers of our time.

First, I have to say Lonesome Dove is a masterpiece of the American West. Second, Comanche Moon and Dead Man's Walk are very enjoyable. I think McMurtry should have stopped there. What made Lonesove Dove were the wonderful characters and the wonderful adventures each of them were having. Every character, wether you loved or hated them, had a story that drew you in and held you. Unfortunatly most of them are killed off in Lonesome Dove leaving little to start a new novel with. The ones that have made it are so dramatically different it is hard to relate to them as the same people. This novel also never really draws you into the story at hand like the previous. There are high points and overall I am glad that I read it just to see where McMurtry went with this saga. However, as a whole it was a great disappointment from the earlier works.

A very good continuation of "Lonesome Dove". A psycho train robber who is a crack shot with a rifle is spreading panic and fear in the South and Southwest. Texas Ranger Captain Woodrow Call is called upon to stop him. The hunt for the young train robber begins. There are many twists and turns in the trail.Call and his troops have many adventures on their treck. They finally wind up reunited with PeaEye in Texas. There are some exciting encounters for Captain Call during their hunt. Many interesting characters are introduced during the telling of this story. The ending is very good. This is another McMurtry classic that you will enjoy. Read it.

The fourth book in the series (Lonesome Dove was written first, but is actually third), Streets of Laredo is the most reflective and least adventurous story. There is still plenty of adventure, but the focus is on one character, the aging Call on a quest to find a killer. As usual, McMurtry writes a story that goes nowhere and everywhere at the same time. His stories are realistic and detailed, almost prosaic, but they are also universal and compelling. Some reviewers say that McMurtry is not a great writer. But by what standards are they judging, and what difference does it make? It's hard to beat McMurtry at sheer story-telling power.

STREETS OF LAREDO REVIEW

This book takes place in the early 1900's in the west of the United States. The villain of the book Joey Garza is a Mexican bandit targeting U.S. trains to plunder. Then the famous ranger Woodrow Call is hired as well as Pea Eye his scout to track down Joey. Along the way they come upon an old Indian friend who is the famous kickapoo tracker named Famous shoes. He is called Famous Shoes because he walks everywhere and does not ride anywhere. Only walks! Well Captain Call is shot by Joey and has to have a leg and an arm amputated. Only Pea Eye and famous Shoes is left to track down the famous killer Joey Garza you have to read the Book to find out what happens at the end.

This is a good book you should read it. The script of the story is flawless.

One of the best books I have read.

Call is old. Only a few characters remain from the past. Life has taken it toll, but Call continues to persevere, alone, without Gus. Life is not what we want it to be. But we continue on, doing the best we can. Excellent book. Teaches the aging process, the endurance and plotting forward movement to the end. Many exciting moments, touching, heart-warming, brutal and grim. Life before our eyes as it is. At the end, it's time to begin reading the series of books all over again!
Evelyn Horan - teacher/counselor/author
Jeannie, A Texas Frontier Girl, Book One - Four

Streets of Laredo is a great book. McMurtry shows, from the first page, something few writers ever show: His characters are human. They die. Gus died in Lonesome Dove, and Newt and July also died at the beginning of Streets of Laredo. Now besides Call, these two were my favorite characters, and when I read that they died on the same page, I neraly put the book in the trash. Then I realized something: McMurtry is honest. He doens't care if we want Call to claim Newt, or July to live happily ever after with his son Martin, or for people to understand the pain and sorrow Call keeps hidden from the world (my own personal opinions) He shows us that life is violent, sad, and ironic. The biggest irony is that the very horse Call gave his son (come on, we all know he is by now) is what killed him. McMurtry makes us realize that no one ever lives happily ever after the way they want to. Just a quick note: Although I love the series of Lonesome Dove and rather frantically read through every book numerous times, sometimes I wish McMurtry had just left it at Lonesome Dove. At least then everyone could pretend that maybe, just maybe, someone in the book could live happily ever after.

WARNING: Plot spoilers. (As if they matter in books from a writer who isn't much interested in conventional plotting.)

The following is not only a review of "Streets of Laredo", but a consideration of the other books in the "Lonesome Dove" series. It includes subject matter some readers might find offensive (though paling in comparison with the events in these books).

As I read this novel, finishing up my traversal of the four "Lonesome Dove" books, I'd intended to give it four stars. But when I reached the chapter in which Doobie Plunkert goes to the sheriff's office to see whether he's heard about her husband Ted (whom Woodrow F Call has seduced into going off with him after Joey Garza), is raped by the sheriff (for no other reason than This Is What Men Do To Women), decides that she is now permanently shamed, and eats rat poison to kill herself, expiring in a graphic and ghastly fashion, I had one of those WTF moments. What, exactly, is going on here?

There would be no point to the following comments if Larry McMurtry /weren't/ a great writer. Of the five McMurtry novels I've read, "The Last Picture Show" and "Lonesome Dove" are masterpieces whose popularity will likely outlive even the youngest people reading this review. It's also notable that McMurtry has been associated with /five/ outstanding motion pictures, four of which were based on his novels. That is a rare and remarkable record for any writer.

It's also true, as one reviewer remarked, that Larry McMurtry is probably the most erratic of living American authors. Great books are so often followed by awful ones, that one wonders how any writer with a shred of self-awareness could have submitted them to the publisher. "Streets of Laredo" is one of those "What was he thinking?" books. Its many weaknesses overwhelm its few strengths.

One need not be a mind-reader to see that McMurtry's historical novels are intended to thoroughly disabuse readers of any lingering romantic notions about the American West. It is an indescribably brutal place, its only "morality" the use of violence to kill the bad people. McMurtry's bad'uns aren't your garden-variety bank robbers or gunslingers, but people whom Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, or Pol Pot wouldn't want to be in the same room with.

In "Lonesome Dove", the chief psychopath is Blue Duck, a half-breed who enjoys rape, knifings, murder, and rape. (He likes rape.) He'd just as soon kill someone as look at them, and he leaves a trail of bodies that includes many sympathetic characters, including a bumbling deputy and a young boy.

McMurtry gets away with this, because Blue Duck is a peripheral character, and the novel is principally a fictionalization of events in the life of Charles Goodnight, best-known as the inventor of the chuck wagon. Woodrow F Call stands in for Goodnight, while Augustus McCrae represents his close friend, Oliver Loving. Goodnight was the first cattleman to drive Texas cattle north (as Call & McCrae do). Loving (McCrae) was shot in an Indian attack, and sent his companion, Bill Wilson (Pea Eye Parker in the book) for help, a journey of a hundred miles. Though both returned to "civilization", Loving (McCrae) died of blood poisoning from the wound, with Goodnight (Call) at his side. Gus asks Woodrow to return his body to Texas, as Loving requested of Goodnight.

This story comprises so much of the novel that, despite its length, McMurtry can't do much to screw it up. Though "Lonesome Dove" is fundamentally a sad and even depressing story (McMurtry wondered out loud why people liked it!), there are so many interesting and well-drawn characters, and (as is typical of even McMurtry's bad novels) the ring of truth sounds over almost all of it. "Lonesome Dove" is a fun read, a satisfying novel that needs neither prequel nor sequel.

Unfortunately, McMurtry wrote two of the former and one of the latter. "Dead Man's Walk" and "Comanche Moon" reveal little about the development of Gus and Woodrow's relationship, but we do get to see Woodrow nearly whipped to death by Mexicans, a relatively mild form of torture in McMurtryland. The stories about the Indians are more interesting, and might justify reading these books. (In case you're wondering... McMurtry's Indians are hardly "noble savages". Though he's clearly on their side, it's in the context of the whites' continuing efforts to exterminate them. Though he apparently admires the Indians' simple lives, they're highly superstitious, and on a certain level, Just Plain Stupid.) "Comanche Moon" includes a weird American Army officer, whose grotesquely oversexed wife throws Gus in a closet before forcing herself on him. The officer is later captured by another of McMurtry's ur-psychos, a man who enjoys cutting the skin off his victims. (The officer is subjected "only" to an attempt to starve him to death, and the removal of his eyelids.)

The problem (as I see it) is that, when forced to /imagine/ a story set in another era, McMurtry can't resist the temptation to create the most frightening and appalling people and events, which often exceed our ability to believe them. (I'm not the Red Queen, and I doubt most readers are.) Many people have horror fantasies (you don't want to know what I'd like to see done to the Geico gecko); McMurtry is one of those rare non-horror writers unafraid to put them on paper.

He's at his worst in "Streets of Laredo". We have not /one/ Norman Bates wannabe, but /two/. Joey Garza was a nice boy who changed after spending two years with the Apache. He considers his mother a whore simply because she's been married four times. He ambushes his mother's third husband, a decent, gentle man, and chops off his hands and feet. He robs trains and kills the passengers (and burns/melts a car full of sheep), not primarily because he wants their money, but because he likes nice things, including a German rifle with a powerful 'scope that lets him commit murder from a half-mile off.

The other is Mox Mox. His fun hobby is to set living people (and even dogs -- "Not Flop!") on fire. (He should not be confused with Lox Lox, who kills people by choking them with slices of smoked salmon.) /One/ of these inhumans would have been enough. We don't need two, except to pad out the novel. It seems incumbent on Larry McMurtry to write Western novels that are Sprawling Tomes.

Nor does McMurtry let us forget how he feels about women. It's common knowledge he's much more interested in his female characters than the male -- seemingly to the point of near-deification -- and his feelings are plain in just about every book: Women are stronger and more-capable than men. They handle adversity better, and are less likely to make foolish mistakes. They're smarter, too, at least to the extent that they know what's right for men -- and men oughta listen. The ideal male/female relationship puts the woman in charge, with the male dragging behind, tethered by a rope through a ring in his nose.

If this isn't obvious, McMurtry spells it out on page 578:

"No beaux?" Lorena asked one morning, when [she and Clara] were sitting in the kitchen, talking. ...

"No beaux," Clara admitted. "I expect it's just as well. I'm too set in my ways now. I doubt there's a man alive who could put up with me. Even if there is such a man alive, he probably doesn't live in Nebraska." ...

"You probably run all the boys off," [Lorena] said. "You have to be gentle with menfolk, you know. They aren't tough, like us."

In the "Lonesome Dove" novels, Clara is the worst example of this type of tough woman. She's toned down in the film (to the extent that some people question Angelica Huston's perfect casting), but in the novel we see her excessive and irrational expectations of men, and how she emotionally abuses July Johnson, another in McMurtry's never-ending parade of feckless white males. Augustus McCrae is a rare exception. Regardless of how Gus feels about Clara, he knows which end is up -- marrying Clara is tantamount to penal (penile?) servitude for life. He's /one/ man she can't control.

And why is that? It's because Gus and Woodrow are such good friends. "You ruined each other", she nearly screams at Woodrow. "Ruined", in this context, means "made unfit for female domination". In McMurtryland, male/male friendship is a direct threat to the dominance of women, and in "Streets of Laredo" two women go into near-conniptions when their husbands leave them to run off with Captain Call in his search for Joey Garza.

The "other" kind of male/male relationship -- which dasn't speak its name -- isn't even /hinted/ at in McMurtryland, because it's a total rejection/refutation of the male's most-basic biological need for the female. The plain and simple truth is that men -- cowboys, especially -- don't actually /need/ women, but McMurtry has (apparently) never confronted this in his novels. (See Badger Clark's "The Lost Pardner", one of the most-famous of all cowboy poems. Give an eye to "Bachin'", as well. Larry McMurtry has likely never had an intense friendship with a man. I doubt he has /any/ understanding of what "Pardner" is about.)

In surveying the first three novels, it becomes clear that Gus and Woodrow, despite McMurtry's claims to the contrary, aren't /really/ friends. They have a dysfunctional "marriage", in which Gus is another one of McMurtry's overbearing females, who is constantly criticizing Woodrow. Though Woodrow is the most conventionally masculine of the principal characters in these books, he's also the most socially obtuse, to the point of stupidity. After failing to capture Joey Garza, and Garza having shoot off his right leg and left arm (which becomes his /right/ arm at the end of the book -- were you snoozing, Diana?) he considers himself "ruined", and even contemplates suicide. Pea Eye and Lorena take him in, but do little to comfort him. McMurtry has always abused and tortured his characters, and his treatment of Woodrow F Call is especially mean-spirited.

In "Streets of Laredo", Maria Garza (Joey's mother) is perhaps the highest realization of McMurtry's ideal woman. Though brutally maltreated by life (a string of husbands, all but one of whom abused her, and three "damaged" children (one blind, one retarded, one psychotic)), she nevertheless hangs in there. Indeed, she loves her children so much, in the irrational way all good mothers do, that, even though she knows Joey hates her and might kill her, she moves Heaven and Earth to find him and warn him that Captain Call is gunning for him. She hates Call with a vengeance, because Call was responsible for the arrests of her brother and father, and thereby their eventual executions. Though she ought to be aware that Joey's death would be, if nothing else, a blessing for everyone living in a radius of at least 250 miles, she'll do whatever needs to be done to preserve him.

In describing Maria, McMurtry pens the following lovely passage, of the sort one rarely sees in his historical novels:

"Of her four husbands, only Benito, the third, had laughed with her. Carlos and Juan, her first two husbands, had been too jealous. Juan was also too violent. Roberto had been too restless; he didn't like to stay put. He could not even stay in bed all night, much less stay with her for months. He didn't live in the past, though. Men who lived in the past brought out /her/ restlessness. Life was there, in the house, in the yard, in the town; in the bedroom, in her hands, in her womb. It was not in the past. The bad things that had happened to her had not killed her. They had not even killed the laughter in her."

McMurtry fails to pay attention to Woodrow's personality. Perhaps because Woodrow is one of the two central characters (Maria Garza being the other), he's now obliged to carry on more or less normal conversations with people. And he seems to be developing some sense of metaphor (note his remark about cascading dominoes). He's no longer the alienated person we grew to hate in "Comanche Moon". He's changed, but for no obvious reason other than that this novel requires it.

Lorena also changes. She's a lot more like Clara, no surprise after living several years with her. Nor is it a surprise she chooses Pea Eye Parker to seduce and marry. * He's simple and unaffected, and therefore easily manipulated. She constantly criticizes him, which hurts his feelings, so she then has to buck him up. The idea of /not/ criticizing him the first place (or at least finding a more-subtle way of doing so) has apparently never occurred to her. A man is not someone whose presence and affection are to be enjoyed, but a botched job that needs to be fixed up. In his historical novels, Larry McMurtry is fundamentally anti-male. (Pea-Eye never showed any interest in women. Had I written "Streets", I would have gotten Pea-Eye involved with a young cowpoke.)

One of McMutry's greatest strengths is one of his greatest weaknesses. He studiously avoids cliché and the obvious, which is good -- there are no preordained, "reader-pleasing" endings to most of his stories. But because his stories have little plot and rarely lead up to any "point" or satisfying conclusion -- indeed, virtually everything that happens in these books has no meaning or purpose -- the characters become merely players in "the ghastly farce of material existence".

Because McMurtry's characters hardly ever find any degree of happiness (let alone simple satisfaction) in their lives (Clara loses her male children and her husband, and is kicked to death by a horse), a pall of meaninglessness, even nihilism, hovers over his stories. He doesn't want us to forget that "life isn't for sissies", but bad things happen to almost all his characters, even ones who /aren't/ sissies. Contrary to what McMurtry says, the strong do not always survive, and he often fails to give his surviving-though-damaged characters any consolation.

It's also worth noting that few characters, male or female, develop close relationships (other than marriage) with other characters. For a writer trying to show the West as it really was, we don't see any of the cowboys developing long-lasting friendships, which was common. In "Lonesome Dove", all the cowboys seem to do is pine over Lorena, or debate her virtue.

At the end of "Streets of Laredo", we are told that the West is moving from barbarism to civilization, and Pea-Eye and Lorena are the sort of people who will lead it there. But after four novels of murders, rapes, burnings, lynchings, child molestations, mutilations, poisonings, skinnings, and all sorts of horrifying incidents that have turned the American West into a Grand Guignol, it's too little, too late, regardless of how accurate McMurtry's portrayal of Western life is. "Streets" has the stink of self-serving post-justification, as if the author has finally discovered a /point/ to all this wretchedness. There is none, and I don't care to hear, in the final pages, that there /was/ one. Reading these four novels is not unlike wading through Mishima's "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy -- though Mishima is even more-plainly pointless, as we discover at the end that everything preceding never actually /happened/.

"Streets of Laredo" is one of McMurtry's poorer works. It's less a coherent story than a conflation of McMurtryland exhibits we've seen before, picked from a file-box of clippings that has nothing happy in it. Besides the psycho killer(s), we have the spouse who commits suicide, the women who abuse men, the men who behave stupidly, the appalling injuries, etc, etc, etc.

It is all-too-easy to imagine Larry McMurtry as a writer for "[I Remember] Mama", the TV series based on Kathryn Forbes' novel about Norwegian immigrants in San Francisco (which I'm old enough to remember):

We were not rich. Yet my San Francisco childhood was filled with happy memories.
I remember dragging home stray cats and cutting off their legs with a hacksaw, bringing much joy to my little friends.
I remember the homeless people of the Tenderloin who, when soaked with naphtha and ignited, infused a glowing warmth to the chill winter air.
But most of all... I remember repeatedly striking my mother with an ax when she refused to purchase the fancy party dress I so badly wanted.
Yes... "I dismember Mama".

Ultimately, McMurtry's poorer novels aren't so much imaginative fiction, as they are his way of spewing his uncensored emotions in the reader's face. It's a shame, because when McMurtry is good, he is very, /very/ good -- one of the bestest writers around.

* It's implied that Pea-Eye isn't very good-looking. But the first actor who played him -- the late Timothy Scott -- was adorable, and the role was later assayed by Sam Shepard (!!!), at one time considered a strikingly handsome man.

Streets of Laredo is a great story filled with adventure, however, it does not do justice to Lonesome Dove. It begins about 20 years after the conclusion of Lonesome Dove. Larry McMurtry hardly tells of the charactars from his previous masterpiece exept for Lorena, Captain W.F. Call, and Pea Eye Parker who are lead on a wild adventure. The Hat Creek Ranch in Montana and the men who worked it are only briefly mentioned. It seems as though Larry McMurtry was tired of the Lonesome Dove storyline. If you read this book, read it as a story of an adventure, not as a sequel to Lonesome Dove.

Well, with just under 100 pages left of the epic tale of (whats left of) the Hat Creek Outfit I am enthralled with another great western written by the master of the genre. As usual, characters jump out of the pages at you and the story comes up and punches you in the guts like a good novel should. I cant wait to find out how it ends!

5/5 Mr McMurtry.

Lord Ramoth

:-)

Lonesome Dove is one of my favorite books of all time..that said Streets of Laredo is a letdown if you compare it to LD but in it's own right it's a gripping, desperate book..Capt. Woodrow Call takes center stage and takes on the proverbial one final mission...to bring in Mexican killer Joey Garza..Pea Eye Parker is now the Captains main sidekick and while he is no replacement for Ol Gus, his own personal lie has taken some unexpected turns as has the other characters from LD..Larry McMurty writes fine prose but there seems to be reluctance to let go of the characters in this book and it seems to drag on for longer then it should..or maybe..it is just natural to feel letdown when your heroes live out their usefullness...

I love this book. McMurtry is a master of plot and character. This book has some horrible bad guys and some great heros. I cried and laughed. Real heart here.
Sorry, I read the last book in the series first, and now I have to go back and read the books that came before. I have ordered them all and do not know why I waited so long to read these books. I loved this book!

The final installment in the Lonesome Dove series is more of a macabre romp worthy of Wes Craven; a Nightmare on Laredo Street.

In some of the most gruesome mutilations and deaths to destroy the myth of the anti-hero, author Larry McMurtry is seemingly writing for himself; burying the characters who survived the initial three novels in what ultimately becomes a very predictable plot of the oftentimes tragic battles within families and the consequences of venturing into a world that is driven by the coldest of hate.

The Epilogue of vignettes finally pushes the story to its rightful conclusion and has a plot that is actually a bit more intriguing than the main work.

While the book should be mostly viewed as a means for a reader to conclude the series, it is not one of McMurtry's finest moments, unless this is actually a bizarre nod to classic horror fiction.

I have a very short attention span but when I finally bought Lonesome Dove and read the first page I was hooked. A page-turner, I found all the Lonesome Dove series quite the same. I own all of L.M.'s novels and series "just because." Born in 1940, I always felt I should have been born in 1840...a cowboy wannabe. I lived each page of all the series and suffered w/ Capt. Call through Streets of Laredo and his final life. I'm glad Larry is a Texan!!!

This was a good book but I was disappointed in the lack of enthusiasm that the characters had. Compared to Lonesome Dove, this book was even more of a downer. Lonesome Dove was sad but in good, touching ways, whereas Streets of Laredo was sad in an uncomfortable way. It made me not like Capt. Call anymore. He no longer seemed like a mystery man with his own thoughts, but became very pathetic. When I finished this book I didn't think back on it very much. It was just over.

Maybe it's just me but, it seems Mr. McMurtry might have been a little bit ticked by the movie "Return to Lonesome Dove" and "Lonesome Dove: The Series/The Outlaw Years". The sequel kills off almost everyone from "Lonesome Dove," so there can be no TRUE Lonesome Dove Part II.
Its a good book and a great story but keep in mind that unfortunately many of your favorite characters from L.D. no longer around.

I loved LONESOME DOVE, and I believe this is a great sequel to it. Many readers complain about the violence in this book,
well, that is apparently how the Lawless West was at the time. Certainly no Disney Land. And if it is "dark", so were those
times. Thanks, Larry McMurtry for not glossing it over.

Though not a normal fan of 'westerns', Lonesome Dove was the kind of book that had me up-all-night turning pages. In fact, as I neared the end, I was so unwilling to finish the experience that I only allowed myself small 'doses' as reward for doing things I normally find unpleasant. Having said that, 'Streets of Laredo' was a book I eagerly awaited and bought in hard cover on it's first day on the shelf.
I put it down, furious after reading only a small part of the first chapter and wrote immediately to Mr. McMurtry in protest because Pea-Eye and Lorena were together. There was nothing in 'Lonesome Dove' to give it validity.
About three years later, I again picked up the book and read it. (Only because it was there and I was looking for something to read.) This time around I was no less irritated with the start, but I was glad to have continued past it.
Mr. McMurtry is an outstanding storyteller and his characters are incredibly real. I highly recommend that you read this particular series.

Wow it was tough way back then. The gritty realism of the life on the frontier really struck home. Desperate men ( and women ) just trying to stay alive. Larry Mc has done a great job of bringing it all home to us modern day would be adventurers. Characters have been portrayed vividly and one must even start to warm to the good old Captn Call despite all his failures. The fringe characters ( in this book ) Clara, Dish, and some of the old hat Creek mob et al may have done with a little more story, but maybe, I guess, that would have detracted from the story line presented . I admired Lorena and her devotion but Maria deserved a better fate than being done in by her no good son - but thats life on the frontier I suppose. Just one question though - how does The Captain effectively sharpen all those tools with one arm ?? Great stuff Larry - I'll be a fan for life !!

While it has been a while since I have read this book, after reading the other reviews, I may have to go back and read it again.
I did not like the way that the author killed off my favorite characters from LD in the first few chapters. To get rid of Newt and Clara was just cruel. Newt especially could have developed into an awesome character.
I also did not like the pairing of Lorena and Pea Eye. This was just too much of a stretch for me to believe. I would rather have her with Dish or even Newt. Pea Eye was just not who I would have picked for her.
Granted, I am not the author and while I greatly respect Larry McMurtry and his work, I was disappointed with this.
I also do not remember the "man burner" being in LD. Lorena said that he was in the gang that kidnapped her and after re-reading LD many many times, I still cannot find reference to him. I am going to have to buy Commanche Moon and read the whole series from start to finish.

This book was ok. I enjoyed the story. It was nice to find out what happened after Lonesome Dove. But this story doesn't nearly live up to the standard set in Lonesome Dove. I think Call without Gus just doesn't work quite as well.
I probably would have liked this better if I hadn't read it right after Lonesome Dove.

I originally read this 10 years ago and I remembered not liking it, but I decided to sit down and read the Lonesome Dove trilogy back to back. Lonesome Dove is an incredible book. You feel like you are there with the characters. Commanche Moon is a blood bath, but at least the writing is good. Streets of Laredo, on the other hand, is one huge disappointment. The plot line itself is at least tolerable, however it appears to be one big advertisement to try to sell more Lonesome Dove copies...whereas the book ought to be able to stand on its own, the reader is constantly treated to gratuitous dull flashbacks to scenes from Lonesome Dove.

One of the few books that I regret reading. As a huge fan of Lonesome Dove, I was excited to get the sequel to his western classic. I can not describe the disappointment of this novel.

My best guess is that McMurtry hated the success of Lonesome Dove and wanted to insult those that liked the book. The characters in this novel have the same name as those in Lonesome Dove, but not the same abilities, thoughts, desires, drive, etc. In other words, these are the same characters in name only.

Most of the book is pointless and boring. The only purpose of this book is to mutilate, torture, and kill the characters that you loved in Lonesome Dove. Sorry for the spoiler.

In the entire Lonesome Dove series, this novel is the one not worth your time.

I loved the entire Lonesome Dove series and think Larry McMurtry is an outstanding writer. His characters develop and the story is amazing. I love his writing and use of words and many of the lessons in the books are still applicable to today's life. I am sorry to have to say good=by to the wonderful saga and will watch miniseries now.

AT THE START OF READING STREETS OF LAREDO I WAS HEARTBROKEN BECAUSE SO MANY OF THE CHARACTERS I LOVED FROM LONESOME DOVE WERE GONE AND YOU JUST KNOW IT WON'T BE THE SAME, BUT THIS SERIES IS AS LIFE..YOU CAN'T ALWAYS HAVE IT GO AS YOU'D LIKE. ONCE YOU ACCEPTTHIS AND YOU KEEP READING, IT'S THE SAME AS WITH LONESOME DOVE...YOU CAN'T PUT IT DOWN AND YOU NEVER WANT IT TO END...A TRULY GREAT STORY.

Larry McMurty has written the follow on to Lonesome Dove. The characters are a bit older and slowing down while going after a cold blooded killer Joey Garza. Reading this book you can feel the cold and sense the desolate nature of west Texas. I found it hard to put down and if you like western novels I highly recommend it.

There are several reviews regarding this book that follow, which actually gives the plot away, not only for Streets of Loredo-but for Lonesome Dove as well!! REVIEWERS TAKE NOTE: IT IS INAPPROPRIATE TO DISCUSS THE KEY PLOTS IN A REVIEW! PERIOD!
As far as Streets is concerned it is a good book-although not up to the Lonesome Dove, in my opinion. McMurtry is still a great writer, and this book proves not to be an exception.

OH MY GOD!!!! Could he have written a more BORING book???!!! I suffered through part one because I had already listened to the other three in chronological order, saving this one for last. Lonesome Dove was by far the best of those three, but this one is by far the worst of all four. The most boring story, read by the most boring narrator!! When part one ended It thought "well, I'll give part two a shot and see if things pick up any." One of the first things to happen in part two is when Lorena decides to go chasing after Pee Eye (BY HERSELF) across the Texas and Mexico wilderness, abandoning her five kids to be sent to Nebraska live with Clara. At that point the decision was made. I'm doing something I almost NEVER do. I'm stopping in the middle of a book and deleting it from my device. I will never waste another penny (or credit) on anything written by Larry McMurtry or narrated by Daniel von Bargen. The combination of this book, with him as narrator was the perfect storm of sheer snooze control!!

Take my advice, run in the other direction!!

I don't understand the author. How did McMurtry ever come up with this hideous ending to one of the best books (Lonesome Dove)ever written. I just wish I had stopped with The Dove & never read this book. It haunts me to think about such an ending. Does anyone who read The Dove ever believe that Lori Darlin' would have ever, in a million years, married Pea Eye? Why have Newt killed off? I have so many questions about this book that just have no answers. If you loved The Dove, don't read this book.

McMurtry must have been paid by the word. Concepts, charactarizations and actions are recounted time after time, and they are often pointless and without interest or entertainment. It is painful to read such pointless drivel

I bought four of McMurtry,s Lonesome Dove series books (Dead Man Walking, Comanche Moon, Lonesome Dove and, Streets of Laredo) after being delighted by the Lonesome Dove TV series. I always thought that a book was better than its corresponding movie, especially after producers and scriptwriters were finished doctoring things up. I bought this collection on that basis (Lonesome Dove)and was sorely disappointed. I can't imagine that the author received the Pulitzer prize for any of these stories. Each book was a little too raw for me and in each one, McMurtry seemed to be in search of a suitable ending; in short they were too long, inane and disjointed. Have you read any of Tony Hillerman or Zane Grey?

I don't understand the author. How did McMurtry ever come up with this hideous ending to one of the best books (Lonesome Dove)ever written. I just wish I had stopped with The Dove & never read this book. It haunts me to think about such an ending. Does anyone who read The Dove ever believe that Lori Darlin' would have ever, in a million years, married Pea Eye? Why have Newt killed off? I have so many questions about this book that just have no answers. If you loved The Dove, don't read this book.

I don't usually read novels.

Lonesome Dove was a gripping story with great description, good pacing, and excellent characters.

I decided to read this sequel, having enjoyed Lonesome Dove so much.

This book feels a little worn out. The characters are poorly developed, if at all. This book is just people going stuff, very little going on.

Includes a few scenes of brutality, but they don't really pump up the excitement in the book.