Literary Fiction Western

Katherine Galloway knew this moment of calm wouldn't last, blown away like the dandelion seeds she scattered as a girl. In 1880, three years after her husband's death, she struggles to run an Oregon boardinghouse and raise two girls alone. Things don't get easier when her critical, domineering mother moves in. Katherine must make the situation work, but standing up for herself and her family while honoring her mother isn't easy. And with a daughter entering the teenage years, the pressure on Katherine becomes close to overwhelming.

Spring Warren breaks onto the literary scene with a remarkable debut novel. This often comic picaresque follows Edward Turrentine Bayard III, who deserts his upper-class family and moves to Nebraska. Soon he finds trouble - and a Pinkerton agent following his every move.

In To Let, Irene's son Jon and Soames' daughter Fleur, now both 19 years old, fall in love. But when Jon learns of the past feud between their families, he decides that he cannot marry Fleur. To drive her from his mind, he travels to America with his mother Irene. Fleur now throws herself at her long-standing admirer, Michael Mont, a fashionable baronet's son, and the two are married.

The year is 1910. Halley's Comet has just signaled the end of the world, and Jack Johnson has knocked out the "Great White Hope", Jim Jeffries. Keystone, West Virginia, is the region's biggest boomtown, and on a rainy Sunday morning in August, its townspeople are gathered in a red-light district known as Cinder Bottom to witness the first public hanging in over a decade. Abe Baach and Goldie Toothman are at the gallows, awaiting their execution.

The separate lives of these driven men and independent women from Europe and America are drawn to a common destiny that beckons seductively from the wild and remote flanks of the American West.

Ten years after the Seventh Cavalry massacred more than 200 Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, J. B. Bennett, a white rancher, and Star, a young Native American woman, are murdered in a remote meadow on J. B.'s land. The deaths bring together the scattered members of the Bennett family.

Spur Award finalist Henry Chappell writes compelling historical novels set in the Old West. In Blood Kin, he tells the story of Isaac Webb, a Texas Ranger caught up in the conflicts surrounding the fledgling Texas Republic. Tensions between the Texans and Comanches begin to mount, and Isaac is sent to negotiate a peace treaty. But, his efforts are hampered by threats of violence and bloodshed.

It had been raining for weeks. Maybe months. He had forgotten the last day that it hadn't rained, when the storms gave way to the pale blue of the Gulf sky, when the birds flew and the clouds were white and sunshine glistened across the drenched land. Following years of catastrophic hurricanes, the Gulf Coast - stretching from the Florida panhandle to the western Louisiana border - has been brought to its knees. The region is so punished and depleted that the government has drawn a new boundary ninety miles north of the coastline.

In Denver, Colorado, Daryl Heatherly is a promising young artist, hoping to find the place she fits in. Back home in the country just outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming - the real West - she's returning to the last place her family all lived together, to a life bordered only by sage and sky. And it's there she rubs up against J. W. Jarrett, a world champion rodeo cowboy and old-school Southern gentleman. Against her better judgment - not to mention that of her best friend, Shawna, and overprotective brother, Jace - Daryl forges ahead despite her own recent heartbreak.

Katie Lane flat-out knows what her listeners want: steamy romances, hot cowboys, and love that conquers all. Catch Me a Cowboy finds Shirlene Dalton in fine fettle. Married to the man of her dreams and living in the biggest mansion in Bramble, Texas, she couldn’t ask for anything more. But then her hubby passes on and she lands back in a run-down trailer right next door to the perfect antidote for heartache: ruggedly handsome cowboy Billy Wilkes.

In the thrilling new saga from Western Heritage and Spur award-winning author Dusty Richards, Chet Byrnes stands his ground - with his courage, guns, and blood. For Chet Byrnes, building a ranching empire means adding new land, hiring good men, finding water and trying new breeds of cattle. But outlaws and Tuscon's idle rich want to take it all away - and Arizona just may be too lawless to stop it.

With Shavetail, Cobb delivers a masterly tale of a young man’s initiation into the brutality of conflict. When 17-year-old runaway Ned Thorne joins Captain Robert Franklin at the Camp Grant outpost, located at the edge of Arizona’s Chiricahua mountains, he enters into a world of blood and redemption. Franklin, still reeling from a failed campaign, seizes on the chance to make amends when a nearby farmhouse is raided—and a woman kidnapped—by renegade Apaches.

In the winter of 1897, a trio of killers descends upon an isolated farm in upstate New York. Midwife Elspeth Howell returns home to the carnage: her husband and four of her children, murdered. Before she can discover her remaining son, Caleb, alive and hiding in the kitchen pantry, another shot rings out over the snow-covered plains. Twelve-year-old Caleb nurses his mother back to health, cleaning her wounds and keeping her fed, before they leave their home to seek retribution on the men who committed this heinous crime.

Yancey and his brother, Billy, rode with Quantrill during and after the Civil War. They hated the Union and they, along with their gang of thieves, rapist, and killers, were raising hell along the border close to Fort Clark. When they robbed a saloon in Brackett and killed two soldiers along with several townspeople, an Calvary patrol, with Tye scouting, was dispatched to bring them in - dead or alive.

Ever since striking it big on a gemstone claim in the Wyoming mountains, Sam Babcock has known luck is on his side - except when it comes to the people he loves. When he forms a surprising connection with an alluring newcomer staying at his friend Wyatt's ranch, Sam starts to question everything he thought he knew. Needing time and space to heal, former daredevil Danny Traveler is camping out in a valley beyond Mustang Ridge Dude Ranch. She wants to take care of herself for once, and a sexy cowboy might be just the distraction she needs.

It is New York, 1904, and Dulcy Remfrey, despite an idiosyncratic, traveling childhood, faces the predictable life of a woman of the time. But all that changes when her eccentric father returns from his expedition to Africa without any of the proceeds from the sale of a gold mine. It seems he's lost his mind along with the money, and Dulcy's obsessive ex-fiancé (and her father's business partner) insists she come to Seattle to decipher her father's cryptic notebooks, which may hold clues to the missing funds.

Return to Oakpine spins a story of growing up and growing old as four high school friends and former bandmates reconnect 30 years after graduating. When they learn that one of them is dying, it feels like getting the band back together might be the most important thing they can do.

A rousing, suspenseful debut novel - True Grit meets Catch Me If You Can - based on the forgotten true story of a Robin Hood of the American frontier who pulls off the first successful kidnapping for ransom in US history. Once the most wanted man in America, Pat Crowe is a forgotten folk hero who captivated the nation as an outlaw for economic justice.

Awardwinning author Robert Flynn delivers a witty and thought-provoking novel about a dying Texas town. When the new highway bypasses it, Wanderer Springs is left to wither in the dust. Will Callaghan, back home for a funeral, remembers the town’s sometimes funny, sometimes painful past, includingthe time he cost his high school the football championship. Will’s remembrances show that the present, however chaotic,is always linked to the past.

Dacee June Fortune's mother died when she was eight, and for the next 23 years she stood at her father's side. Even after she married, Daddy Brazos was her strength, her protection, and her idol. Now, daddy is dying.