Rating: 
Summary: Great Tale of Gus's and Call's Early Adventures!
Review: Exciting, interesting and great read setting the tone for the characters and personalities of two young Texas rangers who will become our friends as we follow them as maturing adults in later books. Realistic adventures and gripping moments!
Evelyn Horan - teacher/counselor/author
Jeannie, A Texas Frontier Girl, Books One - Four
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting Prequel
Review: For me, Lonesome Dove is not my favorite of McMurtry's work. It is an excellent book, and I would rate it 5 stars, but I've always enjoyed The Last Picture Show series the most. That being said, Dead Man's Walk is an enjoyable read. It's not Lonesome Dove, but then, who would want to read the exact same story? For me, I like the variety. This story introduces us to some great characters. Gus and Call are fun, as always. People who wanted the story to be another Lonesome Dove -- for the author to be true to the characters -- another Lonesome Dove is not what has been written. They are young men in this story, and it give us an inkling of what helped shape them into the characters we read about later. I would recommend this book to anyone, especially fans of the Lonesome Dove series. It's definitely worth the money...
Rating:
Summary: A good read but a little disjointed
Review: Having Read Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo, I found this book to be also quite good. I enjoyed the story line and the characters. The style is vintage McMurtry except for the one weekness I saw. The plot seems to be a bit disjointed, with the characters going from one difficulty to the next without ever really wrapping up anything. It leaves you with an unfullfilled feeling at the end. I guess I just wasn't satisfied. It seems a little too obvious that McMurtry is simply setting us up for another prequel.
Rating: 
Summary: A whale of a ride with a not so great ending
Review: Having read the first two books in the Lonesome Dove series (both of which come chronologically after this one), I knew the main characters would survive. This is, however, no more of a hindrance to enjoying this book than it is in any saturday serial movie. The joy is in seeing how the author can get the heroes out of the mess they're in. For the vast majority of the novel, McMurtry delivers saturday afternoon thrills, while still showing just how these young characters evolve into the ones we're all familiar with from Lonesome Dove. Unfortunately, after the Mexican prison scene, the novel comes to a precipitous and ludicruous ending. It is as if McMurty simply got tired or bored with the project and decided just to end the book the fastest way he could Not even a yarn should be tied up this quickly.
Rating:
Summary: Great, but I'm biased
Review: Hi, it's me again, that annoying 14 year old obsessed with LD. I have just read DMW, and I think it was fabulous. Unfortunately, Im extremely biased. I love Gus and Call so much that the book could be terrible and I would love it. Luckily,m this book is just plain great. The characters are expertly set up, and you can see how their experiences made them who they are in LD. I particularly love to see what made Call so silent, with such a serious, determined nature. If I hadn't read LD and SOL, maybe I wouldn't like it as much, but come on: who wouldn't want to read a book as brilliant, touching, and heartwrenchingly funny and sad as LD?
Rating: 
Summary: dud
Review: i bought this book as i was turning the last few pages of lonesome dove hungry for more stories of gus and mcrae. i was sorely disappointed, this was just plain awful. mcmurtry's writing style changed, so much that i'm convinced he didn't write it. maybe he came up with the story but this wasn't the pulitzer prize winning prose we enjoyed in _ld_. gus and mcrae were wimpy characters, rarely shaping their own world, trudging through a storyline of doom only to end in a scene that made me literally throw the book across the room. i wouldn't read this unless you are totally desperate for another ld novel, or want to say that you `read every ld book' published.
Rating:
Summary: Desert Survival and Obligatory Violence
Review: I enjoyed reading most of Dead Man's Walk because it gives you the sense that you are out in the deserts of west Texas before it was settled, and are subject to all that that wilderness has in store for you. Generally, the rangers or their commanders make mistakes from which there is no turning back.But, by the end of the book, with the exception of the dramatic and ultimately funny scene in which a leperous woman puts the fear back into an Indian chief, I had decided that there is just too much unnecessary violence in this book. The worst is the part in which the rangers are designated as the entertainment for a Spanish commander and his party, in which one of my favorite characters needlessly dies. Fiction these days seems to be written with a possible film contract in mind. This author will not get my attention again.
Rating:
Summary: Western or science fiction?
Review: I found the first three-fourths of this book fairly captivating, however, at that point it took a really strange turn. Upon arriving in San Lazaro, the story really lost something and these last few chapters of the novel just didn't fit in with the flow of the story. It's almost as if the author got bored and simply let someone else finish the book for him. A minor problem I had with this book was the way in which insignificant characters were killed off. Gus and Call start off on the main adventure with over 200 people, and the author almost immediately starts widdling down the party to a managable level. Near the end, the ways in which people die becomes less and less believable. And when you consider the odds of both Gus and Call surviving when hundreds around them die, it's pretty unrealistic. The majority of the book is quite good. I would have given this 4 or 4.5 stars if a more palatable ending could have been conceived.
Rating: 
Summary: The worst and most implausible ending ever written.
Review: I give it two stars for the humorous exchanges of Gus and Call, but I was sorely disappointed in the plot, and the ending was enough to make me swear off McMurtry for good. Where he got such a group of stupid and hackneyed characters as the Lady and her entourage I'll never know.
Rating:
Summary: Styronsl
Review: I have read 10 westerns by Larry McMurtry and all have the rich of the west and most true to life that I have encountered. In reading "Lonesome Dove" first, I have always wondered where Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call were from and, if any, of their early years. As true, as in the best, "Lonesome Dove", I have enjoyed the early saga of Gus and Woodrow; the lives they shared and that of being the early law as Texas Rangers. The raw courage of early lawmen were shown in their continuing to settle parts of the open range and the Westward movement. Their encounters of Buffalo Hump to Blue Duck only shows the courage to hunt and bring to order the lawless. In continued reading of Gus and Woodrow, and their meetings of Clara and Maggie, Woodrow fathering Newt, and Gus to never find out of his daughter, Augustina. In comparison to other Western wrighters, none can hold up to the interest and riviting adventures, as portrayed by Larry McMurtry, in that of Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call. "Deadman's Walk" can only get 5 Stars, as that is the top of the chart!
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