Literary Fiction Western

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.

On the American frontier, every gun tells a story. A boy in Texas waits for a Christmas present he chose from a Montgomery Ward catalog. The present, a brand new, lever action Winchester 1886 and a box of its big .50-caliber slugs, never makes it there. Instead, the rifle is caught up in a train robbery and starts a long and violent journey of its own - from the hands of a notorious, kill-crazy outlaw to an Apache renegade to a hardscrabble rancher and beyond.

Dancing at the Rascal Fair by National Book Award nominee Ivan Doig captures the passion and tenacity of turn-of-the-century immigrants struggling to build new lives amidst Montana’s windswept Rockies. The tale unfolds into a contest of the heart between Anna Ramsay and Angus McCaskill—kept apart by obligations—as they and their stormy kin vie to tame the brutal land.

When Andrew Apperley visits his brother David in the East, he brings along an unexpected companion. Andrew's giant wolf dog, Comanche, is so wild that he has to be chained up for the safety of others. However, when the Apperley brothers come across a man drowning in the East River, Comanche breaks loose from his chains and swims to the man's rescue.

In March 1865, the long and bitter War between the States is winding down. Till now, 23-year-old Simon Boudlin has evaded military duty thanks to his slight stature, youthful appearance, and utter lack of compunction about bending the truth. But following a barroom brawl in Victoria, Texas, Simon finds himself conscripted, however belatedly, into the Confederate Army. Luckily his talent with a fiddle gets him a comparatively easy position in a regimental band.

When veiled threats become real, he agrees to hire a discreet security detail. But Devin is shocked to find that the bodyguard is a hard-bodied woman and that he's attracted to the steely-eyed stunner. Former soldier Liberty Masterson's return to civilian life is wrought with challenges until she lands a job with a prestigious security firm. But when she agrees to provide personal protection during a cross-country tour, she doesn't realize she has signed up to masquerade as the playboy star's girlfriend.

USA Today best-selling author William W. Johnstone is a legend in the Western genre. In this 22nd Last Gunfighter novel, Frank Morgan and a handful of survivors are stranded in Western Canada. An old enemy of Frank’s has resurfaced, and with him a band of murderous Metis rebels armed with stolen U.S. Army Gatling guns. Now Frank and his ragtag bunch are the only thing standing between this dangerous foe and a bloodbath.

Drawn to a killing ground... Ten thousand dollars. That's the bounty on the head of the most hated man in Texas - the man Flintlock has been hired to guard. The crime was the brutal murder of a young schoolteacher. The verdict was not guilty for lack of evidence. And the suspected killer's first guard was murdered by a shotgun blast.

This James Lee Burke novel, featuring Son Holland - the great-grandfather of Burke's Billy Bob Holland - as he flees a Louisiana prison camp with a Native American woman and a fellow prisoner in tow, is now available in audio.

Tike and Ella May Hamlin struggle to plant roots in the arid land of the Texas Panhandle. Living in a wooden shack, Tike yearns for a sturdy house that will protect them from the treacherous elements. He has the know-how to build a structure made from the land itself - a house of earth. Though they are one with the farm and with each other, the land on which Tike and Ella May live and work is not theirs. Thanks to larger forces, their adobe house remains painfully out of reach.

When widowed mule breeder Cy Bellman reads in the newspaper that colossal ancient bones have been discovered in the salty Kentucky mud, he sets out from his small Pennsylvania farm to see for himself if the rumors are true: that the giant monsters are still alive and roam the uncharted wilderness beyond the Mississippi River. Promising to write and to return in two years, he leaves behind his daughter, Bess, to the tender mercies of his taciturn sister and heads west.

A body burns in the high desert hills. A boy walks into a fire station, pale with the shock of a grisly discovery. A middle school teacher worries when her colleague is late for work. By day's end, when the body is identified as local math teacher Adam Merkel, a small Nevada town will be rocked to its core by a brutal and calculated murder. Adam Merkel left a university professorship in Reno to teach middle school in Lovelock seven months before he died.

He was still a young man, but he'd used that handful of years effectively, building a bad reputation that spanned the West, his villainy taking different forms everywhere it took roost. Denver knew him as the Doctor; Texans called him Montana; and folks in Idaho called him Texas. On account of his youth, most everywhere else called him the Lonesome Kid.

Set against the sweeping panorama of Arizona circa 1880, this work has many of the surface trappings of a standard western. However, from the first shocking realization that the line between good and evil is being overstepped, the author then begins to dismantle the American cowboy myth.

Two backcountry skiers find the body of a young woman embedded in the ice of a remote mountain creek. All through the night, police work with arc lights and chain saws to dig her out. But identification doesn't take as long. Abbie Cooper is wanted for murder and acts of eco-terrorism, and her picture is on law-enforcement computers all across America. But just how did she die? And what was the trail of events that led this joyous, golden child of a loving family so tragically astray?

In Bramble, Texas, Dusty is the law. That means no leniency for the gorgeous rebel whose highway antics almost got them both killed. The divorced lawman doesn't need another rich, pampered princess, even if Brianne has the lushest body and sweetest smile in the whole darn state. But even as Brianne proves that she lives to walk on the wild side, Dusty begins to wonder if maybe he has what it takes to tame her.

Millanie McAllen is always logical. But after returning to her childhood home, she learns that some things are beyond explanation - like her undeniable passion for Drew Cunningham.... After finding success as a singer on the road, Beau Yates returns to Harmony to make peace with his dying father - only to find the woman he's been dreaming of for years. But the secrets they discover might be too much for him to bear....

Tex Larimee is a grizzled Arizona sheriff who’s leaving the deserts of Cactus County behind, blazing a trail east to mix it up with The Slickers in the canyons of Manhattan. Tex’s welcome to New York is a rude one. Robbed of his cash, gun and badge, he’s locked in a room in back of a run-down bar. Breaking out of the bar, he goes looking for his best friend...only to find him dead, his throat cut. And the cops accuse Tex of committing the murder.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Watson was an infamous brute who ruled his remote patch of Florida with an iron fist. He had no problem killing those who got in his way, and was even rumored as the murderer of legendary outlaw Belle Starr. By 1910, Watson’s neighbors had endured enough. They greeted him as he returned home and promptly gunned him down.

In McGuane's first novel set in his famed American West, Patrick Fitzpatrick is a former soldier, a fourth-generation cowboy, and a whiskey addict. His grandfather wants to run away to act in movies, his sister wants to burn the house down, and his new stallion is bent on killing him: all of them urgently require attention. But increasingly Patrick himself is spiraling out of control, into that region of romantic misadventure and vanishing possibilities that is Thomas McGuane's Montana.