Reilly's Luck

Reilly's Luck is a western novel by Louis L'Amour, published in 1971. It begins with Val Darrant, who is four years old on the snowy night his mother leaves him behind.

What he finds instead of a lonely death is Will Reilly, described as a gentleman, a gambler and a worldly, self-taught scholar. For the next ten years the two of them are all the family either of them has.

Those years take them from the boomtowns of the American West to the cities of Europe. They end on the day Reilly's luck runs out in a roar of gunfire, and the obvious explanations for it turn out to be wrong. The men who did it were not the kind Val had been told to expect, and that is the first clue.

Val soon learns that it was not a gambling brawl or a pack of thieves that killed him but a far more complex story, one that reaches back into Val's own nearly forgotten childhood and forward into the future of a growing country.