Western Crime

Outlaw Wes Cavanaugh knows that crime doesn't always pay - at least not much. That's why he and his partner, Mose, are willing to pay Jimmy Stock for information on a job that's guaranteed to pay off big. Jimmy's made a career of selling tips to bandits, but the job he sells Wes - a payroll train about to leave Omaha - requires more than information.

Years ago Marshal Asher Thrall had shot mad-dog killer Ben Sharkey. And Sharkey has just repaid the favor in spades. With a bullet still in his chest, Ash knows he's a walking dead man. But he's going to make sure Sharkey is one step ahead of him.

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.

At the center of this searing fever-dream of a novel are two men - a killer awaiting trial and a troubled young deputy - sitting across fromeach other in the dark, talking through the bars of a county jail cell: JohnGload, so brutally adept at his craft that only now, at the age of 77, has he faced the prospect of long-term incarceration; and Valentine Millimaki, low man in the Copper County sheriff's department, who draws the overnight shift after Gload's arrest.

A questo autore dall'inconfondibile vena pessimista e cruda, dall'originale scrittura raffinata e apparentemente naturale, tratta dal linguaggio parlato, ma piena di intrusioni e slanci d'autore, appartiene una serie di romanzi dimenticati, a metà tra il romanzo criminale e il western. A questo filone, quasi sfociante nel dramma antirazzista, che allora furoreggiava in certo cinema e in certo teatro americano alla Tennessee Williams, appartiene "Rossa".

Ted Sweeney. Affable everyman in small-town Montana. Tailgate hung on with baling wire, owner of his own business. Ten minutes ago, his biggest worry had been how to pay for the engagement ring rattling around in his pocket. But that was before he came home to find a corpse tidily arranged in his favorite recliner, his "old pal of a piece of furniture". Is it a warning or a setup or what? Sweeney can't help but admire the efficiency of the work, the slice deep across the guy's throat. Somebody knew what they were doing.

Posadas County, sitting along New Mexico's southern border, has enjoyed a surge in visitors, jobs, and prosperity since rancher Miles Waddell used much of his inherited half billion to create an internationally renowned astronomy complex atop Torrance Mesa. Passion, not profit, drives Waddell. Yet benefits include a narrow-gauge train linking the village of Posadas to NightZone. But a ripple of unease is felt across the county with the arrival of developer - no, speculator - Kyle Thompson.

Small ranchers in Harmony, Oregon, are up against it with the price of cattle down and Skull Ranch, owned by a syndicate, trying to buy them out. Dan Riley spends a month trying to find a bank to help them, but he fails. When the editor of The Clarion is shot, the ranchers blame Black Mike Sand, the manager of Skull, in spite of the circumstances of the shooting. As pressure mounts, Riley is determined to find out who is really in charge of the syndicate, and the only man willing to help him is Andrew Daniels, a former newspaper man whose courage comes from a bottle.

Ed Edwards is in the used-car business, a business built on adjusted odometers, extra-fine print, and the belief that "buyers better beware". Burdened by an aging, alcoholic mother constantly on his case to do something worthier of his lighter skin tone and dreaming of a brighter future for himself and his plucky little sister, Ed is ready to get out of the game. When Dave, his lazy, grease-stained boss at the eponymous dealership Smiling Dave's sends him to repossess a Cadillac, Ed finally gets the chance to escape his miserable life.

Con lo pseudonimo di John Colemoore, e con i quattro romanzi del cosiddetto "Ciclo del Nuovo Messico", Giorgio Scerbanenco sceneggiava, per i lettori assetati di sogni e di evasioni, le immagini del deserto americano con i suoi pistoleri solitari e i desperados, venuti dai western più in voga e certamente dal cow boy più malinconico di tutti, Gregory Peck.

On a cold November day in Amsterdam in 2004, the celebrated and controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was shot and killed by an Islamic extremist for making a movie that "insulted the prophet Mohammed." The murder sent shock waves across Europe and around the world. Shortly thereafter, Ian Buruma returned to his native land to investigate the event and its larger meaning as part of the great dilemma of our time.

When U.S. marshal Wyatt McCabe tracks his target to a Texas ranch, he isn't the only one with Lyla Pearson in his sights. But Wyatt has a powerful reason for keeping the beautiful CSI director out of the line of fire-he may be the father of the child she's carrying. The mother-to-be doesn't know who to fear more-the gunmen surrounding her house, or the stranger claiming paternity of her in vitro baby. Holed up together at his family homestead, Lyla struggles to fight her attraction to the sinfully handsome lawman. But with a killer stalking them, it may tear their new family apart....

Brendan Early and Dana Moon have tracked renegade Apaches together and gunned down scalp hunters to become Arizona legends. But now they face each other from opposite sides of what newspapers are calling The Rincon Mountain War. Brendan and a gang of mining company gun thugs are dead set on running Dana and "the People of the Mountain" from their land.

Eli Singer, a rancher and poet in remote Eastern Montana, sees his life upended when a long-buried corpse - which turns out to be a murder victim from Eli's childhood - erodes out of a hillside on his property. This discovery forces Eli to turn inward to revisit the tragic events in his past that led to a life-changing moment of violence, while at the same time he must reach outside himself toward Chloe, a literary agent from New York whom he is falling in love with.

Lenora Whitaker never thought spending one night with U.S. Marshal Clayton Caldwell would put them in the crosshairs of a killer. Connected to a protective custody case gone awry, they are both attacked, leaving Clayton with a damaging case of amnesia and forcing Lenora to go on the run. After taking a bullet to save her life, Clayton is unable to remember Lenora or that he's the father of her baby. But the moment he tracks her down, it's clear the attraction is still there.

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.

She is the last person Dallas Walker ever wants to see again. Still, this U.S. Marshal has no problem taking Joelle Tate into "protective custody" - on her wedding day. To save his family from unjust charges, he'd take on a lot worse than an ex-flame he couldn't trust. But Dallas doesn't know Joelle has put her freedom on the line to protect him. Now with only two days to investigate a long-buried crime no one wants solved, they must confront their past mistakes, and the shattering secret that drove them apart.

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.

Once he was a young, happily married businessman. Then he lost his wife to human madness and that young man was gone, replaced by the Loner, the wandering son of legendary gunfighter Frank Morgan, and now the current occupant of a cell in the brutal and unforgiving Hell Gate prison. The Kid's crime? He looked too much like an outlaw who escaped from this very prison. So the Kid teams up with a fellow inmate with an escape plan, vowing to hunt down a look-alike killer on the loose.

When a legendary old gunslinger finally meets his Maker in some godforsaken West Texas town, Stringer heads to the scene for what he thinks is a routine story. But when he gets to Comanche Woe, it turns out he's landed in the middle of a dust storm of trouble. It's open season on wanted men. A wily varmint called Buckskin Jack Blair has crowned himself Marshal. And murderous vigilantes and bounty hunters are crawling out of the woodwork. When the bullets start flying, Stringer can't tell the outlaws from the lawmen…