"Lando" by Louis L'Amour

Now, that's what I call a rousing good adventure story!

Lando Sackett leaves the Appalachian mountains as a young man, hunted by three of his uncles who are convinced he knows where there's a fabulous buried treasure.  Not Sackett uncles, of course, but his mother's brothers.  Lando and a man known only as the Tinker strike out to find their fortunes in the West, but the Tinker turns out to be involved with that buried treasure too.  After many misadventures and a stint in a Mexican prison where hard labor turned his muscles hard even if his disposition is still pretty kind, Lando ends up duking it out with his childhood nemesis in the middle of a Texas town.  Also, there's pirate gold.  And Lando's dad turns up again and falls for the woman Lando kinda fancies himself.  But somehow, Lando just remains a good-hearted, sensible, nice man through it all.

Honestly, this book just kind of trots along from one adventure to the next, all of which are tied together by that search for pirate gold, which Lando himself is not really all that interested in, but which people around him keep dragging him toward.  I could have trotted along beside Lando for another couple hundred pages.  This is probably going to end up being one of my favorites of the Sackett books.

Particularly Good Bits:

"Mr. Sackett, face a man with a gun or a sword, but beware of bookkeepers.  They will destroy you, Sackett" (p. 43).

"The place for a woman," she said, smiling at me, "is where she is needed" (p. 83).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for a lot of violence, including a brutal boxing match.  Some minor cussing too.

This is my 41st book read from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2023.