The Outcasts' jacket summary was cheesy: "Lucinda Carter heads south to meet her lover, a man as charismatic as he is merciless...Meanwhile, Nate Cannon, a young Texas policeman with a pure heart, strong sense of justice and gifts of a horse whisperer..." head towards a fate that puts Nate and Lucinda in a fight for their lives and sanity. Even with this cliched storyline, I decided to pick the book up because the author Kathleen Kent has usually produced solid historical fiction, most notably The Heretic's Daughter which is about her ancestor during the time of the Salem Witch Trials.
The best thing I can say for this book is that the author is not afraid of the wrath of her potential readers. She creates a bevy of interesting, quirky characters and does not care if her readers are attached to them or not when she writes out their fates in her pages. The story is entirely character driven, without them this novel's plot line would have been incredibly dull. A pirate's fortune buried on a lonely island attracts unscrupulous persons to the area looking strike it rich and kill anyone who steps in their way. There isn't a lot of depth in the story and even the main characters' backgrounds are only referred to in drips and drops, none are entirely fleshed out to a point where the reader really understands their motives or ambitions. The villain is a villain for no other reason than he never killed anyone in the Civil War and our hero's mentors are rough Texas rangers who have unusual connections to the female lead in the story.
I'm not even sure what to call Lucinda Carter: pawn, plot device, brainwashed accomplice? She doesn't really seem to serve much purpose in the story except to create the need for the whole story to take place. She initiates the search for the lost gold, she moves from Texas to Middle Bayou, to New Orleans, but she is never really a willing participant in the plot to murder. Even the big reveal at the end of the story seems to come completely out of left field, as it really has no obvious bearing on Nate Cannon or the lost treasure. She is simply an interesting yet flat character who goes through a redemptive transformation, when the author makes us believe that she is not worthy of such a metamorphosis.
If you are interested in westerns or Civil War era fiction then you might want to give this a try. It is not a trite historical romance, nor an epic in depth time period piece, but the characters are unique and the settings nicely described. So if plot is not a big part of why you read fiction this might be more interesting to you than it was to me.
