“That’s the problem with battle,” said Jack. “You must kill the people who most impress you.”

When Stephen Hunter sets his hand to writing a Western, he does not skimp. The Gun Man Jackson Swagger would make an epic movie, like “High Plains Drifter,” but on steroids and with CGI. Sam Eliot should star.

When the man who calls himself Jack rides onto the Crazy R ranch in Arizona, on a summer day in a year of drought, he’s just a starved old man on a starved horse. But he offers superior horsemanship skills, and so they take him on.

The Crazy R manages to survive as a business, in these hard times, through purchasing stolen Mexican army supplies, a portion of which they sell in the camp called Railhead No. 4. Railhead No. 4 is like other railroad Hells on Wheels, except more corrupt and cruel.

Jack has business with the Crazy R outfit. He also has business with Railhead No. 4, and with a bizarre army of revolutionaries led by a fanatic Frenchman, training in the desert. What is one man against so many? Quite a lot, when the man is Jackson Swagger.

As with any of Stephen Hunter’s novels about the Swagger family, a fair amount of suspension of disbelief is necessary here. But those willing to so suspend will be rewarded by a gripping and moving tale, a genuine epic.

I had some quibbles. Jack “slap-fires” his Colt pistol, which I take to mean what’s usually called “fanning,” and am reliably informed never happened in a Wild West gunfight – the author admits in his Afterword that he saw a modern shooter do a trick with it and had to put it in a book.

There’s also a scene where a villain rapes a respectable white woman – something I also understand never happened in the West, in those days. One assumes the author is catering to modern audience expectations.

Those nitpicks aside, I devoured The Gun Man Jackson Swagger, and recommend it highly, with cautions for some pretty raw action.