Western Thriller

In August 1876, Jack Jones, a reporter for a Chicago newspaper, is assigned to write about the doings of Deadwood, Dakota Territory - a lawless gold camp in the Lakota's Black Hills which draws prospectors and many colorful characters. After the shocking murder of an acquaintance, Jones begins investigating an entire string of murders that begins with wild Bill Hickok and leads Jack down a treacherous trail that has him wondering if he won't be next.

When Wilf Kasmire is asked to guide some hunters on a newcomer’s ranch, he doesn’t think anything is up. After all, he wants to try to make a living as a guide and outfitter so he can enjoy the outdoor life he loves. As he goes about his work, he is nagged by the disappearance of a young woman he used to spend time with, and no one seems to be trying very hard to find her. Ultimately, the two questions come together: does Wilf want to keep on selling the gifts of nature to arrogant clients, and what happened to Heather Lea?

Having been drawn to the wild for a number of years, young Luke McKinney is forced to leave 1839 St. Louis for the North Country even sooner than he expected to go. At 17, along with a female companion and an elderly father figure, he is literally running for his life. With the law pursuing him and the wilderness unforgiving, he finds himself caught up in a survival system that has nothing to do with civilization or laws. Then the unthinkable happens, the only love of his life is taken from him.

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.

Wolf Riker runs his domain with an iron will and smoking guns. And now Christopher Guthrie has signed on to join Riker on his most daring and dangerous journey yet, driving a herd of seven thousand cattle from Texas to Kansas, through land filled with Kiowa, Comanche, raging floods and border raiders. The Range Wolf is ready to face any obstacle in his way. But for Guthrie and the rest of the men, it's a ride into hell, one many of them won't survive.

Rancher Ty Farraday's hunt for stray cattle takes a turn for the worse when he discovers a shallow grave and the body of wealthy Alton Winstead, the owner of the Double-Cross Ranch. Ty's first frantic thoughts are of Winstead's widow, Sue-Ellen, who picked Alton over him. Unfortunately, she chose poorly. Alton masterminded a crime and left his helpers to swing for it. Hungry for revenge, the murderous headcases have overrun the Double-Cross and are holding Sue-Ellen prisoner.

A man is missing, vanished in the uncharted wilds of the new northern territories. And not just any man, but a scholar - a scholar whose influence extends all the way to Washington. Jack Percy is asked to do the unthinkable: enter the hostile wilderness near the Canadian border, without the aid of military support, locate and extract the missing man. His reluctance is strong and sensible - the man has surely already met his fate. But something tugs at him, something internal, something more than the federal reward.

An American writer travels with his fiancee to Tahiti and is lured away from her by the seductive splendor of the island and by a Tahitian beauty named Faaone, who sweeps him into a web of murder, deception, and revenge.

The kingdom of Rimbaku has fallen on hard times. Under attack by its neighbors, the once-great empire struggles to defend itself even as it stagnates, its people obsessed with atachi, the Relicant Touch, and the skills and memories that magic lets them absorb from the bones of their dead.

Just as Ivy’s brother Billy is about to get engaged to his beloved, a tragedy interrupts the happy moment. The body of longtime Santa Sofia resident Marisol Ruiz washes up on the beach - and it’s even more heartbreaking since Marisol’s father also recently died. But Marisol was a strong competitive swimmer. It seems unlikely there’s even a grain of truth to the theory that she accidentally drowned.

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.

Mike's best years are behind him. There was a time when he was the best rider in the circuit, but a divorce and years of hard living have worn his body down. After an accident, his career comes to an abrupt end, but his boss gives him one last job: He must cross the border into Mexico, kidnap his boss’ son, Rafo, from his boss’ ex-wife, to be used as leverage in their ongoing divorce. Mike arrives to find the boy has already run away, and his plan is immediately exposed to the local police.

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.

When a plane crashes at the base of Black Tooth Mountain during a wicked summer storm, Patrick Flint’s moral compass leads him away from a trail ride with his family and to the wreckage in a search for survivors. But what he finds may teach him that not everything is what it seems, and not every life is worth saving.

Anomaly Defense and shapeshifter Bert Blackfeather doesn't need a boss with no experience. So what if she's beautiful or gives him a jolt when she shakes his hand? He never plans to get seriously involved with another woman - not in this lifetime. Phoebe Wagner, an empath with psychometric abilities and an advocate for the deaf, gets more than she bargained for with Bert. When his niece goes missing from Hotel LaBelle, Bert goes to Montana to help, and Phoebe decides to go with him. Can these two hard-headed people share their darkest secrets in order to work together?

The day that Stephanie and Doyle meet, circumstances fight against romance. She thinks him rude, crude, and bossy, and while he loves her long legs, he thinks she seems snobbish and cold. However, he feels she has interesting possibilities, and she thinks he is a sexy hunk. How important are first impressions?

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.

Crawford County, Texas, hadn't had a deliberate homicide in 80 years, and Sheriff Charles Matthews liked that statistic just fine, particularly since his department wasn't generously endowed with manpower. Folks in Crawford County didn't altogether understand Charles Matthews. It wasn't his law degree - lots of folks had law degrees and were still respectable - and it wasn't the fact he was from Dallas. It wasn't even because he never told anybody why he left Dallas. It was because Charles had no nickname in an area where nicknames were as common as sagebrush.

Flush with raw silver and ruled by a baron with an iron fist, the tiny mining outpost of Shank’s Point is under siege by a sinister evil. When the rising sun reveals the claw-torn bodies littered among the rocks, John Swift-Runner calls on his old friend, a vagabond gunfighter, to stand with him against the slaughter he knows will come. But as their band of misfits hunts for the creature on the burning sands of the Mojave, they stumble into a generations-old mystery that goes beyond shamanic curses and into the bloodstained pages of legend.

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.