There are no cowboys or Indians in this Western novel. Rather, the action takes place in the fairly well-settled Colorado town of Paradise, where the frontier is a place of purer morality than the decadent East, rather than a place of lawlessness. This attitude figures closely in the actions of the story.

The novel focuses on the actions and decisions of two men. One is Amos Burch, benevolent ruler of Paradise. He's the richest man in town and morally upstanding - until he falls for a lovely widow and decides to keep her as his mistress. Daniel Knott works for Burch in his bank, and unwittingly stumbles on Burch and the widow in flagrante delicto, and Burch decides to buy Daniel's silence with a hefty promotion.

Author Richard S. Wheeler has chosen to tell the story in a third-person omniscient voice. He introduces the book, apparently the first of a series, as narrated by Horatio Bates, the town postmaster and amateur philosopher and observer of human affairs. Bates is telling the story, and tells it through alternating viewpoints of everyone involved. It's an old-fashioned narrative device that gives the book a flavor of the late 19th century (though thankfully, Wheeler and Bates stop short of Dickensian digressions and asides to the reader).

The setting and the characters are well drawn. I sympathized greatly with Knott's dilemma, as he accepts a promotion to a job he knows he can do, and which will advance his family, but which he suspects did not come to him based on his merits alone. His situation, and his conscience's agony, worsens as Burch's wife sues for divorce, and Daniel is literally the only one whose testimony can free her from her marriage, but if he testifies, Burch will surely destroy everything he holds dear. But I also found myself sympathizing with Burch's wife, the widowed mistress, and even Burch himself, as the story unfolded.

The supporting cast comes alive as well. The lawyer willing to take on the man who literally owns the town, Knott's wife Hannah, torn between loyalty to her husband and her protectiveness toward her children and her own situation, and Eloise Joiner, the widow who gets involved with Amos Burch: all take on lives of their own within the story. I especially liked Eloise, and would have liked to have seen more of her in the tale.

The Witness is a morality tale and makes no bones about it. While the outcome seemed pretty predictable, and unlike so many Westerns, the scope was very small-scale, I nevertheless found myself staying awake until the wee hours to finish the book and see how it turned out. Wheeler takes on a subject that isn't covered much these days - personal ethics - and while I am impressed with that, I wish that Knott had been a little less starchy and a little more human. But The Witness does effectively show that one person's decisions and leadership by example can push other people towards doing what they know to be the right thing, too.

The Witness is a book that deserves a larger readership than it will probably find. It's somewhat simplistic but far better written than many books I've read lately, and has a definite feeling of time and place lacking in so many historical novels. It would be a good jumping off place for a high school (or homeschool) discussion of ethics and decision making, too. If you are in the mood for a quieter Western than the genre usually offers, pick up The Witness.