Slocum and the Widow Kate

Title: Slocum and the Widow Kate
Genre: Western Fiction
Author: Jake Logan
Illustrator: Bart Jerner
Publisher: Playboy Press, Chicago, Illinois
Series: Slocum #3
Year: 1975
Pages: 224
Format: Paperback, mass-market format.
Provenance: Previous owner’s name rubber-stamped on first page.
Opening Sentence: “He rode into Hidalgo late in the afternoon, a big, raw-boned man with brooding, haunted eyes and a tight, faintly amused set to his mouth that further stretched and flattened the planes of his weather-burned face.”
Random Passage: “Wheeling, he headed back to camp—and drew up suddenly. Two riders were silhouetted against the evening sky to the south. At a considerable distance, they were moving slow and not toward him but angling instead to the west. The line of his jaw hardened and his eyes narrowed as he watched them gradually drop from sight. He had no way of being certain but he had a deep-down gut hunch they were the same pair he’d seen a few days earlier on their back trail.”
Notes: The Widow Kate was the third in a series of “Lusty Adult Westerns, starring that ornery cuss, John Slocum.” Jake Logan was a pseudonym for several different authors. Eventually the Slocum books stretched to an astonishing 430 titles (final volume Slocum’s Silver Burden was published in 2014), making it among the most prolific series in fiction.