A Roaring in the Wind, one more work about the Old West, with all the usual clichés and overworked situations and characters, simply didn't seem very promising.

But Taylor has done a good job. The extensive bibliography merely suggests that he has done his homework (or at least looked up book titles); the novel itself suggests that he has been able to transform the deadness of facts into the life of fiction in a manner that may well win him the same acclaim that his The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters did some two decades ago. In fact, there is an echo of that earlier work….

Taylor has an undistinguished style, and the "footnotes" included by Ross, the narrator of the account given to us in the novel, are pretentious and obtrusive. Yet the book comes alive for the reader, and its humor, authenticity, occasional bawdiness, and conflict...