IT seems odd for a paperback re-issue not to cash in on the success of the Hollywood film which presumably prompted it.

Especially when that film, The Missing, starred Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones and was a western spoken of in the same breath as Clint Eastwood's classic Unforgiven.

The Last Ride was first published in 1995 and is good enough not to have to ride on any film's coat-tails.

The year is 1886. Samuel Jones is a man "broken in body and soul", as the book's jacket describes him, and he has ridden hard to reach a remote New Mexico ranch. His appearance is strange and fierce, more Apache than white man; despite this, rancher Brake Baldwin offers him a bed and a meal. Brake's wife Maggie, as soon as she sees him, is furiously hostile.

Jones, it turns out, is Maggie's father, who abandoned her and her mother 30 years ago to run off with an Apache woman. Now the old man has come back to seek forgiveness before he dies.

Maggie is not in the mood for forgiving, until an Apache raiding party shoots her husband and kidnaps her eldest daughter Lily, planning to sell her into prostitution in Mexico. Patching up their differences, the dying Jones and his daughter Maggie set off in pursuit.

What follows is a moving, haunting western in the classic tradition of John Ford's film The Searchers. Themes of love, betrayal, kinship and redemption are teased out as the characters pass through the bleak, baked New Mexico landscape to a final reckoning on the rugged Rio Grande river that divides the United States and Mexico. Compelling.

Updated: 08:44 Wednesday, June 09, 2004