Western Crime Thrillers

David Robbins continues the proud tradition of Ralph Compton's Western novels with enough hardscrabble heroes, blazing gun fights, and twisted villains to fill a corral. Bluff City is a booming silver mining town full of pigeons to pluck. When two of its wealthiest citizens devise plans to rob their neighbors legally and illegally, only Clay Adams stands in their way.

High season is coming to an end, and fishing guide Jake Trent suddenly has some time on his hands. As the ex-lawyer ponders rekindling his romance with park ranger Noelle Klimpton, a surprise call from a long-lost love lights up his phone.

It's been years since law school graduation, when Jake last saw Divya Navaysam. Now a DC lobbyist, Divya wants Jake to come to Washington for a consulting job - immediately.

Sgt. Bren Allred has seen all manner of criminality in beautiful Graham County, Arizona. He has managed to keep the worst of it from his wife, Monica, who is having a troubled pregnancy. But it will be difficult to keep the devils at bay as a new kind of trouble erupts across the region . When deputies Sanchez and Haley go undercover to investigate a rash of copper theft, they unwittingly stumble across a shadowy spy network. Meanwhile, Apache Police Sgt. Al Victor is confronted by a murder case involving a diplomat as he grapples with the ever-present problem of alcohol on the reservation.

After two tours as a sniper in Iraq, Tommy Smith has returned to his former life as a cowboy and wilderness guide in California’s Sierra Nevada, hoping to reclaim the simplicity of his youth and heal the wounds the world can’t see. When, high on a mountain pass, he and his partner find the wrecked plane of a billionaire adventurer who disappeared months earlier, a seemingly innocent act triggers a breathtaking cycle of violence that threatens Tommy’s world.

Railroad worker Woodson Fulk wants nothing more than to keep his head down, do his job, and live out his days in peace. However, when his sister comes to him covered in bruises that her husband gave her, Fulk’s rage drives him to murder the wife-beater. With his brother-in-law’s blood on his hands, Fulk goes on the run, looking for a place that he can lay low and wait out the law. He soon finds an old shepherd and his grandson who are being harassed by local cattlemen. Fulk offers to scare off the ruffians in exchange for room and board.

The Man Who Moiled for Gold draws its title from the Robert W. Service poem: "The Cremation of Sam McGee". The poem tells of suffering, loneliness, frustration, and ultimately death. Charley Martin experienced all of these emotions along with love and success while becoming the man who moiled for gold. Charley Martin, in 1912, is found mining the hard rock of Butte, Montana. Years of breathing the fine quartz dust in the pits have given Charley silicosis. Discovery of this incurable condition, by the mine super, brought an abrupt change to the 69-year old miner's life.

Small-town boys Caleb and Jake Boyd spend their days splitting logs and barely scraping by in the badlands of New Mexico. Caleb, a decorated war hero, wants to put his fighting days behind him, find a decent job, and start a quiet life with his new fiancée. But Jake is always dreaming bigger than he should, and when he stumbles across a large crop of marijuana hidden in the wilderness, he thinks he has finally hit the jackpot.

The hardworking single mother of young daughter, Joanna Brady still feels the acute pain of loneliness and loss, the hole that was left in her heart when her policeman husband was murdered. But Sheriff Brady is the law in Cochise County, and murder has shattered the small town's fragile peace. A local gun dealer has died violently, and his stock of high-powered weapons has been cleared out. When two more slayings follow soon after, suspicion falls upon rancher Alton Hosfield.

This book is a work of fiction that tells the story of the first gold strike in the Montana Territory along Willow Creek in 1862. The gold camp grew to over 10,000 people, and Bannack became the first capitol of the Territory of Montana. My story tells about the lives of the four gold miners that made the strike, and it recounts the many hardships endured by the men and women living in a gold camp in the high mountains.

He's riding straight into danger. Wrangler Angus Savage has come to Wyoming to help Jinx McCallahan get her cattle to high country. He's signed on for the dangerous drive, eager to reconnect with the woman he knew when they were kids. Now in the wilderness the no-nonsense cowboy and the strong-willed rancher must navigate the trail's many hazards - like her treacherous ex who wants her back...or dead. Contains mature themes.

When Eleanor Wooley's best friend Rette suddenly disappears, Eleanor abandons her job as a crime reporter for the Gold Strike Tribune in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and sets off in desperate pursuit. What begins as a search and rescue operation quickly becomes an obsession and a personal quest for truth. Spurred by gut instinct, Eleanor scours Northeastern Nevada during the worst heat wave in recorded history. Obscure signs appear-an intruder's dire warning, a casino's mysterious graffiti, a random sighting of a killer on the run.

Reeling from the news dropped on his desk days earlier, Sheriff Elven Hallie is left questioning everyone and everything in his life. But when a former deputy is burned to death, Elven must push aside the turmoil in his personal life to catch the killer. As if that wasn’t enough, new faces from the Starcher clan enter his county with vengeance in their eyes for Corbin’s death. Paranoid, angry, and directionless, Elven must lean on those closest to him to bring a ruthless murderer to justice. But that’s easier said than done when it’s those closest to him who he trusts the least.

Seventeen-year-old Mariana Villalobos's mystic gift creates a sensation in northern Mexico as hundreds of people undergo a personal religious epiphany. Even gangsters reject crime. Seeing revenues tumble in the drug trade, the Liones cartel issues a hit order on the girl.

Thad Taylor is no one's idea of a fine man. Usually drunk and shiftless, he's disapproved of by most - especially his father. But when his father doesn't return from a trip across the Kansas plains, Thad is the only one who can search for him. And he's far from ready for the ordeal. Because his father is already dead. He has fallen victim to the bloody Benders - a demented family who lures travelers into their cabin way station only to rob and brutally murder them.

It’s early summer in Jackson, Wyoming. Former East Coast prosecutor Jake Trent, now a local fishing guide, is wading through a swift current of local politics, introspection, and tragedy. Three seemingly unrelated deaths have occurred in one day - unheard of in the scenic valley. A skier perishes in a freak late-season avalanche. A French couple is discovered mutilated on a remote trail in Grand Teton National Park - presumably by a bear.On the Snake River, Jake himself finds the body of an expensively attired tourist fisherman.

Former Posadas County Sheriff Bill Gastner, now a New Mexico Livestock Inspector, is enjoying a day on Herb Torrances. But Bill soon finds himself ferrying a broken cowpuncher in the back of his SUV, headed out to meet an ambulance.

Edie Kiglatuk is working as a summer school teacher in the Canadian Arctic. When one of her female students is found dead in nearby Lake Turngaluk, Edie enlists the help of Sergeant Derek Palliser to pursue the case, promising the girl's Inuit family that they will uncover the truth. Meanwhile, lawyer Sonia Gutierrez investigates the toxicity of the lake and suspects that there might be a larger conspiracy involved.

Some treasures are better left buried. Jay Bohmer never turns down an adventure—especially not when it involves Clint, the childhood friend who once saved his life. So when Clint buys a mysterious artifact linked to the legendary Lost Dutchman’s Mine, Jay agrees to join him on a quest into Arizona’s Superstition Mountains, hoping for gold but ready for anything. But he’s not ready for murder. When Clint is found dead in a canyon—his death blamed on the spirits said to guard the treasure—Jay is left reeling. Locals whisper of curses. Shadows move where they shouldn’t.

Some people, it is said, have the "Midas touch", and all that they touch turns to gold. For Elena Ellery, however, the opposite is true. Everyone that Elena comes into contact with, fares badly. When gold is discovered on what was historically believed to be her father's property but was never registered to him and the placer miners who discovered the gold are shot dead by her family in an unfortunate misunderstanding, this unleashes a chain of events that affect the rest of her life.

The story begins in 1900 with the birth of the main character, Frank Hardin. Following his heroic military service with "Black Jack" Pershing in France during the Great War, Frank comes home and takes up the gun and badge, following in the footsteps of his father who was a career lawman. After the death of his father, Frank heads to a violent Texas oilfield boomtown in a misguided plan to come to the aid of his first girlfriend who is being victimized by a gang of violent criminals who are running the town.