CHENNEVILLE by Paulette Jiles

John Chenneville wakes up from a coma in a Civil War infirmary in Virginia.  Slowly but surely he begins to remember his past and makes his way home to Missouri.  There he discovers that his sister and her family have been brutally murdered by a sheriff’s deputy named Dodd.  Thus begins Chenneville’s quest for vengeance as he travels through Indian Territory and into Texas, tracking Dodd.  Chenneville himself becomes a suspect in another murder so that he is both the hunter and the hunted.  This is a rather low-key adventure novel in which Chenneville encounters both the worst and the best kind of people along his journey.  He has to be wary at every juncture, but he is savvy and possesses good survival skills, including knowledge of Morse code, which comes in handy more than once.  He is also compassionate and seems to attract stray animals, while Dodd leaves a trail of horses that he has literally ridden to death.  Chenneville is such a good man that he is a bit one-dimensional, but my support for him did not waver until I realized that he was potentially sacrificing the prospect of a happy life in order to continue his pursuit of Dodd.  Predictability is one of the weaknesses of this novel, but Jiles still knows how to spin a good yarn and manages to weave in characters from her other novels.  In fact, Dodd himself, who adopts several aliases, actually appears in Simon the Fiddler under a different name.  Nifty.