In his last volume of the Berrybender Narratives - a four-book saga that tracks Lord Berrybender and his family as they trek across the 1830s American West - Larry McMurtry has brought the arrogant family and its long-suffering entourage full circle. Loose ends are tied up and old enemies disposed of.

As before, the people are cartoonish and the credibility is strained. (Where are the ATMs from which the Berrybenders get their apparently inexhaustible cash supply?) But readers who expected such things didn't learn from the first three Narratives. We're in the literary land of Law Unto Itself, and we may as well enjoy the ride.

And the company. Tasmin Berrybender is a good fellow traveler as she considers her next step. After four years on the frontier, the wayward Tasmin is homesick for her family's estate in England. As Folly opens, Tasmin is grieving her beloved Pompey's execution at the hands of his vengeance-obsessed Mexican captor. Though never consummated, their bond was deeper and would likely have proven more lasting than Tasmin's relationship with her husband had McMurtry gone that route.

Readers of the series will see how far she's come, from a pretty but insensitive girl to a self-possessed woman. This doesn't make her Little Mary Sunshine, just the most interesting person in this bawdy assemblage.

Motherhood and coping with her spouse have matured her. Matrimony with a mountain man is dicey at best, and Tasmin is in her fourth year of questionable bliss with a particularly eccentric example, Jim Snow, the Sin Killer. As Jim sees it, his role as paterfamilias is to provide meat, and backhand his wife for the sin of profanity on his occasional visits to the family.

No wonder Tasmin wants to see Northamptonshire. The high-handed way she takes with her intimates and her questionable company manners make you wonder how she can ever go home again. Still, her courage ensures that you hope for the best.

Jim Snow, a more subtly drawn personality, is headstrong himself - to say the least. Readers are treated to one more appearance of the Sin Killer in full retribution.

This opens the door for McMurtry to introduce Rosa, a prisoner Jim rescues from a slave train during this act of vengeance. Rosa is the girl of his dreams: skilled in the outdoors and submissive. She doesn't curse and doesn't talk. Her views on love coincide with Jim's, and he wonders why Tasmin can't be nice like that. But then, if she were, she wouldn't be Tasmin.

It's clear that the Snow-Berrybender ménage cannot survive. Tasmin muses that while she loves her husband, she does not love the West enough to shape herself to suit the demands of her marriage. "She was a daughter of privilege, English privilege, and Jim was a son of necessity - American necessity. Such a combination might thrill, but could it endure?"

Time to go home.

It's a pleasure to see some of McMurtry's supporting cast again. It's a pleasure, for example, to see Draga the slaver get her savage comeuppance at the Sin Killer's hands, or the mountain man Kit Carson henpecked in his own pueblo.

And there are new friends, too: It's delightful to sit next to Dr. Edgechurch at dinner and hear his detailed thoughts on how quickly a torture victim will expire. (Incidentally, the victim is within sight of the dining room.)

It's likewise a pleasure to make the acquaintance of Jupiter, one of Lord Berrybender's numerous illegitimate offspring.

It is no pleasure, on the other hand, to lose Jupiter and other members of the party to cholera, after the Berrybender party is expelled from Santa Fe, forced to march across the desert to Vera Cruz, escorted by Mexican soldiers.

But how else could McMurtry get the Berrybenders to Texas in time for Lord Berrybender to join the folly and glory of the Alamo?

True to the last, selfish Lord Berrybender's last hope is that the mission be overrun before the brandy runs out. He gets his wish.

Loyal readers won't be surprised at how Folly ends. But they should wonder what McMurtry will do next.

Tasmin's daughter, Petal, has the best answer. "It's rather too soon to know," she has a habit of saying, stealing the words from her mother.

Petal is second to Tasmin as the most interesting character Folly has to offer. It seems likely that the next series will belong to her.

Christine Jacques is a freelance writer living in Golden.