Review of "The Wickedest Town" by McKenzie Catron-Pichan

​Score: 94+/100 (9.4+ out of 10)

The Wickedest Town by McKenzie Catron-Pichan is a quirky paranormal mystery novel with a fresh Western twist!

Welcome to the wickedest town in the West, where the ghosts outnumber the living, the hotel hides secrets in its walls, and Butch Cassidy’s daughter has just checked in.

Yes, we really said Butch Cassidy's daughter!

Stella Cassidy is eighteen, armed, sharp-tongued, socially guarded, and able to see ghosts. Cool!

After years of receiving blank postcards from her legendary outlaw father, she finally receives one with instructions: go to Jerome, Arizona, find Scotty at Hotel La Muerte, recover the $50,000 from the Wilcox train robbery, and watch her back because “Hell follows the horses.” Stella arrives in Jerome, a town packed with spirits, and checks into the haunted Hotel La Muerte under the terrible (and humorous) alias Stella Colorado-Lopez.

At the hotel, she meets a lively cast: Pearl, the sleepy but formidable hotel keeper; Jericho Woodrow, a young Pinkerton agent with a cane and a moral code; Scotty Claude, a supposedly dead former Wild Bunch member who has been hiding in plain sight; Jasper, the teenage cattleman Scotty raised; Boyd, the nervous cook; Minerva, a glamorous “soiled dove”; and Cedric, a predatory bordello owner. Stella’s job quickly becomes complicated because Jericho is there for the same stolen money, believing Butch himself may arrive to retrieve it.

Scotty reveals that the money is more dangerous than Stella realizes. It is not just cash. Something hidden with the stash is cursed and connected to the Lost Dutchman, the Superstition Mountains, ghostly disturbances, and unearthly hounds. Before Scotty can fully explain, he is found dead at the bottom of the elevator shaft. At first, it looks like an accident, but Stella and Jericho discover signs that he was murdered, and the hotel becomes a locked-room mystery with everyone under suspicion.

The middle of the book becomes a tense interrogation drama. Stella and Jericho question the hotel’s residents, and their partnership becomes the emotional spine of the novel. Jericho knows Stella is lying, but he also sees her clearly in a way few people ever have. Stella, meanwhile, is torn between her loyalty to Butch, her criminal upbringing, her grief over Scotty, and her growing respect and attraction toward Jericho. Her secret eventually comes out.

What really stands out to us about this book actually isn't the characters or even the story, it's Catron-Pichan's writing! The writing is exceptional! It's witty, eloquent, and sophisticated. You can tell that the author has a gift for writing, accompanying a wide array of creative ideas.

One of the things that Catron-Pichan does well is use literary techniques like alliteration, similes, metaphors, sensory imagery, and personification. We get passages and lines like:

"I can still smell the tobacco smoke curling
through the air in thick tendrils and the tang of
whiskey on the men's breath, hear the stray gunshots
outside and the coyote's moonlight songs."

"...in this haunted town of sin and
secrets."

"She didn't mind my need for
sameness and certainty"

"It's created this lightness in my
chest, like a nymph unfurling its body to become
more."

"Agent Woodrow's notebook feels
like a cinder block in my grasp."

"He puffs his chest
as he lifts his chin, looking like a child trying to
stage a coup."

“...black iron railings... like thorny vines”

“I become a storm, and right now, my insides feel like thunder.”

“...something I can take apart and put back together again”

"...like an oil painting depicting the perfect air of casual openness”

The author is able to use this figurative, stylistic language to evoke emotions and paint a vivid, visceral picture.

The author also uses the effective motif of the cicada, a symbol of hidden life, transformation, and emergence. That fits Stella perfectly, because so much of her journey involves burying her true self, enduring pressure, and slowly becoming something stronger and more fully realized.

Another thing the book does well is it doesn't present Stella or her legendary outlaw dad as necessarily good or great people. They aren't Mary Sues and Gary Stus! Stella (and the narrative) remind us again and again that she was taught to lie, cheat, and steal. There's this pretty messed up part in which Stella reflects on how she learned to escape from ropes by her dad, who'd tie her up and throw her in a closet when she was 8 so she could learn to escape tough situations. That sounds bad enough, but she describes times in which she would have to use splinters of wood from the flooring to cut through the ropes, causing her hands to bleed. That's some trauma!

But Stella isn't just morally gray, she's also a bit of a goofball who makes mistakes. That makes her a lot more relatable and believable than a Mary Sue. Even her pseudonym "Colorado" is ridiculous and raises a lot of eyebrows. She constantly lies herself into corners. By the way, the way she describes having outted herself is brilliant: "...like a bag of grain with a hole at the bottom..."

This is a fun, well-written read.

Check it out on Amazon!