9780062683045
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Last Stand at Saber River audiobook

  • By: Elmore Leonard
  • Narrator: Richard Poe
  • Category: Crime, Fiction
  • Length: 6 hours 20 minutes
  • Publisher: HarperAudio
  • Publish date: February 21, 2017
  • Language: English
  • (40 ratings)
(40 ratings)
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Last Stand at Saber River Audiobook Summary

A quiet haunted man, Paul Cable walked away from a lost cause hoping to pick up where he left off. But things have changed in Arizona since he first rode out to go fight for the Confederacy. Two brothers–Union men–have claimed his spread and they’re not about to give it back, leaving Cable and his family no place to settle in peace. It seems this war is not yet over for Paul Cable. But no one’s going to take away his land and his future–not with their laws, their lies, or their guns.

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Last Stand at Saber River Audiobook Narrator

Richard Poe is the narrator of Last Stand at Saber River audiobook that was written by Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard wrote more than forty books during his long career, including the bestsellers Raylan, Tishomingo Blues, Be Cool, Get Shorty, and Rum Punch, as well as the acclaimed collection When the Women Come Out to Dance, which was a New York Times Notable Book. Many of his books have been made into movies, including Get Shorty and Out of Sight. The short story "Fire in the Hole," and three books, including Raylan, were the basis for the FX hit show Justified. Leonard received the Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN USA and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He died in 2013.

About the Author(s) of Last Stand at Saber River

Elmore Leonard is the author of Last Stand at Saber River

Last Stand at Saber River Full Details

Narrator Richard Poe
Length 6 hours 20 minutes
Author Elmore Leonard
Category
Publisher HarperAudio
Release date February 21, 2017
ISBN 9780062683045

Subjects

The publisher of the Last Stand at Saber River is HarperAudio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is Crime, Fiction

Additional info

The publisher of the Last Stand at Saber River is HarperAudio. The imprint is HarperAudio. It is supplied by HarperAudio. The ISBN-13 is 9780062683045.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Goodreads Reviews

Jeffrey

August 02, 2019

“And she thought if you don't have the desire to fight or wait for something there's no reason for being on earth.” First edition paperback original copy of the book. The Confederacy claims the lower half of New Mexico and Arizona as one of their states. The upper halves are still considered Union territory. Paul Cable homesteads on the Union side of Arizona, but despite the geography, he is originally from Texas and signs up to fight for the Confederacy. He joins the 8th Texas Cavalry under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest is an aggressive commander and a gifted tactician who believes a good defense is a better offense. ”Never stand and take a charge...charge them too.” Cable is shot several times in various campaigns, and the last time it is severe enough that, if he had been fighting in Vietnam, it would have been called a “good wound,” which is any wound that allows the soldier to go home. After he recovers, he picks up his wife and kids in Texas and heads back to the homestead on the Sabre River, but when they arrive, like most of the South and West, things have changed. Men are living in their cabin, and a large horse herd is grazing on their land. They soon discover that their land will only be theirs if they are willing to take it back. Cable’s wife Martha is not a hothouse flower. She has grit to spare. She proves this when some Chiricahuas Apaches attack their spread. ”He stood waiting with a revolver in each hand. Martha stood behind him with the shotgun. And when the door gave way he fired six rounds into them in half as many seconds. Two of the Apaches fell and Martha stepped over them to fire both shotgun loads at the Apaches running for the willows. One of them went down. ”The important words for me are…”Martha stepped over them”. She isn’t squeamish and handles herself as well as any man. As the plot uncoils, I start to realize that in many ways Martha is more level headed than her husband and certainly weighs every situation carefully before making a decision. She is a true partner to him, not the housecleaner and baby machine that many women were in this era. All the women in this book are women to be reckoned with. Lorraine Kidston, who is the daughter of one of the men opposing the Cables, is strong willed and sure of herself, even though she is difficult to like. She is intent on wedging herself between Paul and Martha, not because she is attracted to Paul, but because she is bored and enamored with her power over men. Do you fight for what is yours, or do you move on?So the Kidston brothers are on one side, and the Cables are on the other side. In the middle is the one armed man named Janroe who runs the general store in town. He is a man who could have stepped onto the screen of Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece Pulp Fiction and been perfectly at home. He lost his arm in the war. I could say that the war changes a man, but I have a feeling that Janroe was a psycho SOB before the war. The war just gives him an opportunity to let loose the demon inside. He is the key element of this book that keeps it from just being another western. He manipulates both sides of the conflict against each other. When things don’t move quickly enough, he does something to keep things agitated. He wants the Kidston brothers dead because they sell horses to the Union. He wants Cable dead because he wants Martha in his bed. He is smart, calculating, and ruthless. Once you get the jist of him, he is a hard man to stomach. Elmore Leonard wrote nine westerns, eight of them before he really started writing the great crime fiction novels that Hollywood fell in love with. They all have elements that reveal the writer he is going to be. I can’t help liking a guy who gets his start in Westerns and ends up writing some of the best noirish crime novels of his generation. The Library of America has decided that his novels deserve to be immortalized on acid free paper in their beautifully designed slip case or black dust jacketed books. They have released three collections so far. Over the weekend, I wrote them and asked if they had plans to collect his Westerns into a Library of America edition. They confirmed that they will be doing so in 2018. A movie of the same name as the book was made in 1997 starring Tom Selleck and Suzy Amis. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.comI also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten

robin

December 10, 2022

An Early Elmore Leonard WesternElmore Leonard (1925 -- 2013) had a prolific career as a writer and is best-known for his crime novels. Leonard began as a writer of westerns. The Library of America has recently published a volume of Leonard's western novels and stories. The collections begins with the novel "Last Stand at Saber River", originally published in 1959 as a Dell paperback.The novel is set in the Arizona territory at the end of the Civil War. The major character, Paul Cable, is returning to his home in Arizona after being discharged from a Confederate hospital. Cable had served as an office with Confederate cavalry commander, Nathan Bedford Forrest. Cable has a wife, Martha, and three small children. While Cable has been away, his home has been occupied and annexed by the two Kidstrom brothers who own the adjacent ranch. The use the property to supply cattle and horses to the Union Army. The story turns on Cable's efforts to recover his property. It involves a great deal of violence and intrigue.Another Confederate veteran plays a prominent role in the story, a one-armed operator of a general store, Edward Janroe, who is involved in smuggling weapons to Confederate armies. Janroe is a highly sinister middleman between Cable and the Kidstroms.The novel moves with a great deal of tension after a slow opening. The characters are types but also are individually developed. The taciturn, hard Cable seeks to reclaim his life and maintain a loving family relationship with his wife and children. Leonard develops a good deal of ambiguity in the character of the Kidstrom brothers resulting in some shifting alliances as the novel progresses. From the outset, Janroe is a thoroughly detestable figure.The book offers a good portrayal of the Civil War and of its impact on the soldiers. It also shows the problems facing the combatants upon their return to civilian life, even in a place far removed from most of the action such as Arizona. Most of the characters are believably portrayed. In the book, violence does not end with the end of the Civil War but rather pervades this novel in the story of Cable, the Kidstroms and their hired hands, and Janroe. There is a toughness to this genre western and a sense of the need to fight for what one believes in and holds dear, in war and thereafter.The writing is spare and direct, of the sort Leonard would develop further in later work. The book includes several sub-plots and many characters which make it difficult to follow particularly in the opening pages.The novel is an excellent American genre western with a focus on character. I was glad to get to know it in the Library of America.Robin Friedman

Daniel

December 02, 2017

Reading an Elmore Leonard book can be unsettling. His writing seems to speak privately to the reader’s mind where nothing is sacred and anything can happen. He plays with perceptions. He takes advantage of the human tendency to believe in one’s own righteousness while simultaneously suppressing truths to the contrary. He quietly forces the reader to acknowledge that there is never a "hero" in a Leonard book that is completely worthy of that distinction.To this end, Last Stand at Saber River is Leonard at his typical best. Good and bad characters abound, but good is divided from bad based on the breadth of the character’s ability to see reality for what it is. As such, the good characters may perform evil acts, but they also recognize those acts for what they are. And the bad characters are those that simply placate their desires even if their desires produce positive results. This may sound confusing, but it’s not. In fact, the end result is life as it has always been.The setting brings life to an old west that consisted of remote ranches located along remote riverbanks that supported life. This aspect of the book gives Last Stand a quiet and peaceful undertone that is contrary to other books of the genre that are filled with wooden plank towns, their bars with swinging doors, and rowdy brawls that spill out into the muddy streets. Picture instead cobbled streams of cool water fringed with willows and upper highlands of pinyon pines. Leonard paints a landscape and then places his story in the foreground.The only detraction was one of the minor characters, the daughter of rancher that was transplanted from the eastern US. She added color to the plot, but she did not truly fit into the overall content of the book. Nevertheless, I’ve grown to depend upon Leonard to provide a refreshing reading experience and this book did not disappoint.

Amanda

September 12, 2017

Leonard isn't the author to go to if you want a deep immersing sense of the Old West, and his dialogue could belong to modern characters. But he's definitely one to go to for a story driven by tension and characters who step off the page with larger-than-life personalities, which is at least one part of the great mythology of the Western. A few of the twists were expected (in Western trope fashion, which I happen to enjoy or I wouldn't keep reading Westerns), but a few of them were unexpected too. I enjoyed this as a typical Leonard read: I got to root for the good guy and anticipate the explosive climax of death for everybody else; I plowed through it fast and sighed with relief on the final page. No doubt I'll read him again.

Heath

September 23, 2014

Paul Cable, having fought on the Confederate side during the war, has returned with his family to his homestead on the Saber River, only to find that his land has been taken by the Kidstons', two wealthy brothers loyal to the Union. Cable thought he'd left the fighting behind him, but it seems he's now in the for fight of his life, not just for his home, but for the lives of his family as well. He has a possible ally in Southern sympathizer and gun-runner Janroe, but Janroe, who would like to see the Kidston's dead, may turn out to be Cable's worst enemy in disguise.This one is very strongly about the concept of honor and family; Cable is reluctant to kill, even though Janroe makes an argument that it's STILL a war that's being waged, only without uniforms. LAST STAND AT SABER RIVER has a somewhat relaxed pace for the first 3/4s, even though there are some startling moments of action and violence. It really gets moving, though, in the last fourth, when revelations come to light and loyalties shift. There are three female characters-- Cable's wife Martha, Luz, the girl who works at the store Janroe has taken over, and Duane Kidston's bored daughter Lorraine-- but all of them are remarkably well-drawn and believable for a Western written in the 1950's. Especially Martha. That was pretty refreshing. Yes, a rescue of Martha and the children takes place at the climax, but Martha has a hand in rescuing herself as significant as her husband. Not my favorite Leonard Western, but very solid nonetheless.

Warren

January 21, 2017

Confederate Soldier Paul Cable leaves the Civil War and returns home with his wife and family to Saber River. However since he’s been away the Kidston brothers Vern and Duane, along with their henchmen, have taken over his home and land. Can Cable trust the one-armed storekeeper and war veteran Janroe, who may not be what he seems, to help him get his home back? The path is set for what on the surface appears to be a formulaic Western showdown but as the author of Last Stand at Saber River is Elmore Leonard the narrative has many twists and turns. Tension slowly builds through a series of confrontations leading to an exhilarating climax. Once again Leonard creates strong complex characters even within the confines of the Western genre. To summarise this is another outstanding western novel from the late master crime author Elmore Leonard that surely deserves more recognition.

Nik

December 29, 2021

Written by Elmore Leonard in 1959, my copy is published 2005. Leonard is famous for both his crime novels (Get Shorty, Mr Majestyk, Glitz, and Out of Sight) and also westerns (3:10 to Yuma, Hombre, Valdez is Coming, Joes Kidd, and The Bounty Hunters) and many of his books have been filmed. Last Stand at Saber River took almost forty years to be filmed, as a TV movie starring Tom Selleck, Suzy Amis, Haley Joel Osment, Keith Carradine, David Carradine and David Dukes.The film and the book differ mainly in the beginning and end sequences.The film starts earlier than the book, filling in background that is flashbacked in the book. The Civil War still rages. Reported killed in action, Paul Cable is a Confederate veteran returning home to surprise his wife Martha and two children (they lost a third to disease while he was away fighting; though in the book the child is alive [economising on young actors]). His family has been staying with her parents but now he is going to take them to their homestead in Arizona, which they left during his absence. However, in the book it begins with them arriving at the trading post which is near to their homestead. But the owner has passed away and it is now part owned by Janroe who lost a hand in the war.Cable soon learns that a Union-sympathising family has assumed control of Cable’s homestead and land. This is the Kidston family: Vern, his brother Duane and his daughter Lorraine. Some of the Kidston cowhands are staying at the homestead. Cable chases them off. Thus begins an ongoing feud between the two families. In the book Cable suffers two brutal beatings at the hands of the Kidston crew and Duane (the film doesn’t impose this on Selleck, he is tougher and not averse to killing in self defence).Janroe harbours a powerful hate for the Union and all who supported the North. He is intent on engineering further conflict between the two families, even while both Vern and Lorraine are about to talk rather than fight with Cable and Martha. It is all brought to a head in the final pages and is taut and tense, as one is accustomed when reading any Elmore Leonard book.However, the film moves beyond the book, stretching out the suspense, determined on inserting more action and conflict.Both endings work for their different media.If you like the actor Tom Selleck, then you should enjoy this film. If you like a novel with conflict, strong characterisation and a moral core, then you’ll enjoy the book.

HornFan2

August 04, 2019

Basically a re-read, plucked out of my library, this is one of my favorite Civil War reads, the wars close to ending and Elmore at his best. Enjoying it you know what's come but it stands out more due to all the descriptive details you forgot and makes it all the better. Elmore Leonard's in class of his own, along with several other authors that never ever disappointed their readers, quite the wordsmith and creates a nice escape from the annoying things in life.Could Leonard ever bring his character's too life, good or bad they helped tell his stories, he put you the reader into the pages, your right there in the action and never wasted a word.The "Last Stand at Saber River", set in Arizona the spring of 1865 and Paul Cable returns home along with his wife Maggie, their 3 children to the homestead they left when he went of to fight for the Confederacy. Due to his wounds from the war, he's sent home, he returns to Texas for his family and not to give too much away. Leonard spins a epic yarn, as Cabe reclaims the home he left behind, he fights to reclaim it from another Rancher who took over possession of it, he makes it suspenseful, with a few twist and turns and it's the author at his best.

William

May 30, 2021

Believable plot and setting. Although the movie was good, nothing beats good writing and good narration.

Don

August 15, 2014

Another winner by Elmore Leonard. In these early works he seems to favor the strong, silent hero. His heroes take a lot of abuse but show restraint in responding until they are pushed to their limits. He also shows that his hero in this book can take an adversarial relationship and turn it around. In this book, his hero, Paul Cable, is a rebel soldier returning home just before the end of the Civil War. He finds that his house and land have been occupied by a group of men that are supplying fresh horses to the Union Army. Instead of going in to this situation with guns blazing, he seeks to work it out with the group through many different avenues. By the end of the book, we find Cable and his adversary uniting against a common enemy. Leonard ends the book abruptly leaving us to speculate how the future will turn out for these two likeable, but amazingly similar, characters.

Clifdisc

April 30, 2012

Leonard's laconic style is well suited to Westerns. The writing in this novel is as terse as the characters. It is those characters that make this novel what it is. While Leonard does not waste a lot of words, his characters are always well fleshed out, complex and, most importantly, believable. It goes without saying that people are complex and Leonard captures this complexity as well as any novelist writing today. Last Stand at Saber River is, on some levels a deconstruction of the classic Western. Leonard sets up a classic confrontation and, while the novel does not shy away from violence, the morality of that violence does not go unexplored. War is war, self-defense is self-defense and murder is murder. When those lines start to blur, a moral man will weigh his actions carefully and that conflict is the heart of this book.

Bryson

August 09, 2018

Awesome. Beginning to end Leonard is a master storyteller. I love Leonard books, but am not a huge fan of the western genre. I grabbed 4-5 of his western paperbacks at a closing sale of a used bookstore and I am so glad I did. This book was sheer perfection in storytelling and a great example of how Leonard can take a very simple idea and keep you gripped and wanting to keep going for more than 200 pages. Highly recommended.

Ed

May 09, 2016

"Western - Paul Cable returns from the Civil War to find two brothers—Union men—have claimed his spread and they're not about to give it back, leaving Cable and his family no place to settle in peace. It seems this war is not yet over for Paul Cable. But no one's going to take away his land and his future—not with their laws, their lies, or their guns."

Michael

September 14, 2018

Had never read any of Elmore Leonard's westerns. Rank him up there in quality - crisp, simple, sparingly written story. Am hooked.

Scott

June 11, 2017

Does a great job of establishing a tension and maintaining it throughout.

Francis

July 10, 2018

events spiral out of control for a compelling collection of characters in this thrilling Elmore Leonard Western.

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