Literary Fiction Western

Part of Ivan Doig’s acclaimed Montana trilogy, English Creek revolves around Jick McCaskill, a 14-year-old growing up in 1930s Montana. This incandescent coming-of-age tale dramatizes the climatic events of one summer that inevitably mark Jick’s awakening from childhood to adulthood.

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.

After a prostitute is murdered at the Easy Nickel saloon, Texas Ranger Josiah Wolfe finds his best friend, Scrap Elliot, in jail and wrongly accused. A strangely familiar horse and a mysterious code are the only clues Josiah has to prove his friend's innocence and save him from execution. Once a Yankee reporter gets involved, Josiah is led to Blanche Dumont's House of Pleasures, where he learns of a thieving, jail-broken accountant with strange ties to both the Easy Nickel and the town's wealthiest banker. With a new railroad line blazing into town, everyone - especially the arrogant young sheriff - is determined to clean up Austin.

The last thing Ruby McGavin thought she would be doing after her husband, Cole, died was meeting his family. He had claimed his relatives were all dead, and she didn't know him long enough - they were only married one year - to think otherwise. But it turns out that members of Cole's family, from a small ranch town in California, are very much alive, and they show up on Ruby's doorstep with the news that she has inherited some land from her husband.

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.

When Bonnie McKutchen left her wealthy husband in a storm of heartache and betrayal, she fled New York with nothing but the dress on her back. Eli McKutchen finally caught up with her in a Washington mining town, outraged to find his beautiful wife dancing for money in a gaudy saloon. Yet as his temper flared, so did his passion...for nothing could extinguish Bonnie's blazes once she set them.

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.

Orphaned after the death of her mother, 18-year-old Esther Chambers heads west in search of her only living relative. In the lawless frontier town of Century, Oregon, she’s met by a sunburnt, laconic cattle wrangler: her distant cousin, Ferris Pickett. Within days, Esther is perjuring herself at the county clerk’s office, swearing that she is 21 and ready for the rigors of homesteading. Pick leads her to a tiny cabin that shows daylight at the chinks, and Esther begins her new life on the small lake called Half-a-Mind.

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.

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.

Recovering from a difficult divorce and having problems with her daughter, Shelby accepts a summer job cooking at a family-run dude ranch. She hopes the animals will be just what her daughter, Lizzie, needs. Little does she know that ranch life will work some healing magic on her, too.

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.

Screenwriter, actor, producer, and award-winning author Andrew J. Fenady knows the Western genre as few do. Destiny Made Them Brothers follows General Ulysses S. Grant, George Armstrong Custer, and Rebel Johnny Yuma, united by fate and friendship. The elusive one of the bunch, Johnny plays a vital role in Grant’s victory for the Union, Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and Custer’s deadly campaigns in the West.

On the top floor of a small hospital, an unlikely piano prodigy lies in a coma, attended to by his gruff, helpless father. Outside the clinic, a motley vigil assembles beneath a reluctant New Mexico winter - strangers in search of answers, a brush with the mystical, or just an escape. To some the boy is a novelty, to others a religion. Just beyond this ragtag circle roams a disconsolate wolf on his nightly rounds, protecting and threatening, learning too much.

The second son of Brazos Fortune, Samuel, is somewhat the lost sheep of the Fortune family. After he is run out of Texas, he ends up hiding out with his father and brother. Although he struggles to escape the consequences of his previous lifestyle, he refuses to talk about the past. Brazos has to deal with sending Samuel back to Texas to make amends or allowing him to have a new start in Dakota.

A band of kill-crazy outlaws smash the bank in Caliche Bend, New Mexico. And by the fine white powder that covers everything - even the dead - everyone knows The Snowman has struck again: for this notorious bank robber uses bags of flour to stabilize the nitroglycerin used in his dynamite blasts.

Jonathan and Ellen Ware have immigrated to the area from their farm in Illinois with 13-year-old Christy Ware and her two older brothers. The Wares are only one of the families that will soon be caught up in the burning issue of slavery with raids from the Border Ruffians out of Missouri and John Brown's small army devoted to ending slavery and helping runaways to escape to the north.