Western Crime

This program features multicast narration. “I read everything Ivy Pochoda writes. Her capture of the complexities, diversities, and insanities of today’s life and culture is next to none. I loved Sing Her Down. The world will too.” —Michael Connelly, author of Desert Star No Country for...

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.

Following his crimes in Bruisewater and the murder of his brother-in-law, Woodson Fulk travels with the mysterious Asher to the town of Barrenwood in the Wyoming territory. There, he meets Abigail Friedan and her posse of bounty hunters. They agree not to turn in Fulk, in exchange for his help hunting down outlaws more terrible than himself, and bringing them to justice.

Jason Crow, double amputee and Vietnam War vet, has good reason to dislike the retired officer who bad-mouthed Jason's father and his African American business partner. But when Bartholomew calls late one night with a mysterious request that Jason come by his house, then turns up dead, Jason has to set his feelings aside. Clyde Burker, his old police nemesis and now head of the homicide division, doesn't want Jason meddling in yet another murder investigation, but Jason won't stay on the sidelines when Burker points a finger at Jason's own loved ones.

Driving home from Utah, Howard Moon Deer is passing through an empty stretch of New Mexico desert when a young Chinese woman staggers onto the highway, seemingly out of nowhere, and collapses before his onrushing car. Howie screeches to a stop but she dies before he is able to get help. Who was this woman and where did she come from? When Jack Wilder and Howie are hired by a non-profit organization, Washington Women Against Trafficking, they are soon embroiled in the most dangerous case of their career.

Will Cannon had gone to Durango a few years ago and taken care of the Silver Dollar Killer and the Edwards Gang, but now a new group of murderous outlaws are taking over Durango. Will and his brother, Joe, do business in Durango, and he is not going to allow a gang of outlaws ruin his business there. Will rides to Durango and later to the lawless mining camp of To Hell You Ride, Colorado, to fight the outlaws. He enlists the help of some miner vigilantes and some young cowboys and Pete Abrams and his other men from Chama to fight the outlaws.

"An atmospheric, slow-burning beauty of a book, rich with raw-edged lyricism and achingly real characters." —Tana French, author of The Searcher Small-town secrets loom large in this spellbinding debut about the aftershocks of crime and trauma that shake a Nebraskan town. In a dusty town in...

The vicious Mexican cartel war boils over into the Big Bend in the explosive new novel from the author of The Far Empty and High White Sun. In the Mexican borderlands, a busload of student protesters is gunned down in broad daylight, a violent act blamed on the Nemesio cartel. But its aging...

From the Edgar Award-winning author of the Hap and Leonard series, a hard-boiled novel set in 1960s Texas in which a no-nonsense car salesman faces a tempting decision, a dangerous deal, and an alluring affair. Ed Edwards is in the used car business, a business built on adjusted odometers...

Polly McClusky ist elf und eigentlich zu alt für den Teddybären, den sie überallhin mitnimmt, als überraschend ihr Vater vor ihr steht. Nate ist aus dem Gefängnis ausgebrochen, um Polly das Leben zu retten. Denn auf Polly ist ein Kopfgeld ausgesetzt. Nate hat sich im Knast einen mächtigen Feind gemacht: die Gang Aryan Steel hat ihn und seine Familie zu Freiwild erklärt. Nates Exfrau wurde bereits getötet, Polly ist die nächste auf der Liste.

After fastball phenom Prospero Stark's baseball career craters in a Mexican jail, he retreats to a trailer park in the scorching Arizona desert. He lives in peaceful anonymity with a collection of colorful outcasts until someone leaves his former catcher's severed hand on his doorstep. Beautiful, hard-living reporter Roxanne Santa Cruz, who keeps a .380 Colt and a bottle of Chivas in her car, joins Stark to help him uncover his friend's fate, a dangerous pursuit that pits them against a ruthless gang of drug-dealing killers.

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.

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.

When Senator George Hearst taps Neville Stryker for another off-the-books job, it leads him straight to the gutted remains of the Mark Hopkins Mansion—once a crown jewel of Nob Hill, now a crime scene soaked in silence. The tenants, the Bosworth family, have vanished, their blood staining the marble, their bodies nowhere to be found. Locals whisper the place is cursed. Haunted. But Stryker knows better. Evil wears many masks, and not all of them are dead. Inside the mansion’s decaying splendor, strange things stir—phantoms of the past, secrets buried deep beneath velvet and stone.

On a bloody day in 1887, death came to Blanco, Texas. Before the sun went down, the livery stable was torched, an outlaw gang robbed the bank, two men were killed, and young newlywed Ellie Taine was raped. One of the dead was the man who planned the robbery - the son of dying, legendary Texas Ranger Jonathan Crossland - the other was Ellie's husband, an innocent bystander.

Alto, corpulento, con barba y melena, sombrero de ala ancha y botas de vaquero, el texano Roy Cady lleva unos años ejerciendo de matón profesional en Nueva Orleans. Roy es un tipo tranquilo, comprensivo, capaz de ver el lado filosófico de las cosas, lo cual no le impide ser implacable cuando la ocasión lo requiere. Pero su vida da un giro radical el día que le diagnostican un cáncer avanzado. De pronto, sus puntos de referencia se trastocan, y el relieve de la realidad cobra una nueva dimensión.

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.

When Santa Claus enters a Texas bank just before Christmas in 1927, no one expects him to pull a gun. The fake white beard hides his identity from his neighbors while he and three others take everything. But their easy heist goes sideways fast when armed lawmen and citizens assemble to claim a new reward for dead bank robbers. Taking hostages, the gang forces a path through a frenzied and bloody shootout, setting the whole Lone Star state on their trail. One bandit dies in the getaway.

There are rules in the West no matter what era you were born in, and it's up to lawman Ty Dawson to make sure they're followed in the valley he calls home. The people living on this unforgiving land keep to themselves and are wary of the modern world's encroachment into their quiet lives. So it's not without some suspicion that Dawson confronts a newcomer to the region: a record producer who has built a music studio in an isolated compound.