'Me--Smith

A man rides alone through the cold Montana sagebrush, over the line and lost in more ways than one. He calls himself Smith, though even he seems uncertain of who that is. A killer with a violent past, he moves through the harsh Western landscape like a ghost until chance encounters pull him back toward humanity: a robbery gone somewhat sideways, a Native American woman, a schoolmarm named Dora Marshall who makes him feel something he thought he'd left behind. Caroline Lockhart's 1914 novel is a moody, morally complex character study disguised as a Western. It's interested less in gunfights than in the question of whether a man defined by his worst impulses can still reach for something better. The prose has the lean, atmospheric quality of the best early Westerns, and Smith is a protagonist you can't quite look away from, dangerous and magnetic in equal measure. For readers who like their heroes morally compromised and their landscapes stark.