Action Fiction Western

There’s something rotten in Wyoming, and it’s not just the smell of cow pies — the first whiff is coming off the Laramie County Cattlemen. Right off the bat, Duff notices something odd: no small-time ranchers allowed. It’s big-leaguers only. And none are bigger than Brad Houser, owner of the sprawling Twin Peaks ranch. He’s up in arms over the small-timers claiming the unbranded mavericks who escape their herds. Which is perfectly legal. No brand, free cow.

Colonel Utah Blaine, held captive by the Army of the Revolution, broke out of jail and headed north from Mexico with nothing but the clothes on his back. Then he found new trouble struggling at the end of a noose - and stepped in just in time to save the life of a Texas rancher. The would-be executioners were the rancher’s own men, looking to steal his land.

Busted out of prison by an outlaw friend, Flintlock joins a hunt for a fortune - a golden bell hanging in a remote monastery. But between the smouldering ruin of his former jail cell and a treasure in the Arizona mountains there will be blood at a U.S. Army fort, a horrifying brush with Apache warriors, and a dozen bloody showdowns with the schemers, shootists, madmen, and lost women who find their way to Flintlock's side.

When Tom Chantry comes west to buy cattle, he quickly runs into trouble. During a drunken scuffle in a bar, Dutch Akin challenges Chantry to a gunfight. Leaving town rather than face Akin, Chantry is quickly branded a coward. Later, when hiring men to take his herd to the railroad, Chantry faces a dilemma: No one wants to make the long, dangerous ride with a leader of questionable courage. So when French Williams, a shrewd and ruthless cattleman, makes Chantry an offer, Tom reluctantly accepts his unusual terms: Tom must remain with the drive from start to finish.

Clay Bell spent the last six years fighting Indians, rustlers, and the wilderness itself to make the B-Bar ranch the prize of the Deep Creek Range. But Jud Devitt, a ruthless speculator from the East, now threatens everything Clay has worked for. Devitt, holding a contract with the Mexican Central to deliver railroad ties, wants to harvest timber off the land where Clay grazes his cattle. Backing Devitt are shady politicians, a dishonest banker, and fifty of the toughest lumberjacks in the county.

A Rocky Mountain winter has left Breck reeling from the carnage unleashed by bloodthirsty trapper Judd Carnahan - and readying a quest for vengeance as ruthless as their prey. It gets even deadlier when Carnahan lays siege to a trading post on the Yellowstone River. He's left the owner dead and kidnapped a pretty hostage who can turn a nice profit once he puts her to work.

The Loner didn’t just bust out of jail, he busted out twice. The third time might be the charm — or a bullet in the belly. He didn’t want much — just the chance to drift out of Texas into New Mexico Territory. That’s when the Loner discovered there was a price on his head. A victim of mistaken identity, he broke out of Hell Gate Prison a few years back. Now, he’s behind bars again, until a sheriff’s love-struck daughter decides to come to his aid and a beautiful bounty hunter — who also has eyes for the Loner — joins in.

When Duff MacCallister sees smoke rising from his neighbor’s ranch, he knows that something is very wrong. But he isn’t prepared for what he finds: smoldering buildings, a rancher and his wife brutally slaughtered, and a 14-year-old survivor who could not save her parents. Now, Duff is going after the killers — and his only companion is the headstrong girl who refuses to be left behind.

Like a murderous plague, a band of cutthroats and criminals, led by prison escapees from New Mexico, rages through West Texas. They're slaughtering everyone in their path: men, women, and children. They struck at Saragosa. Now they've taken over the town of Boracho. The Dallas newspapers call them the Kingdom Come Gang. In Chugwater, Wyoming, Duff McCallister calls them his enemy. Because one of their victims was family.

When Duncan McKaskel decided to move his family west, he knew he would face dangers, and he was prepared for them. He knew about the exhausting terrain, and he was expecting the punishing elements. What he worried about was having to use violence against other men - men who would follow him and try to steal the riches that he didn't even possess.

The marshal's name was Borden Chantry. Young, lean, rugged, he's buried a few men in this two-bit cow town - every single one killed in a fair fight. Then, one dark, grim day a mysterious gunman shot a man in cold blood. Five grisly murders later, Chantey was faced with the roughest assignment of his life - find that savage, trigger-happy hard case before he blasts apart every man in town...one by bloody one.

The story was that Eli Patterson had died in a gunfight, but Mike Shevlin knew it couldn't be true: The man who'd been like a father to him had been a Quaker. But when Shevlin rides back to Rafter Crossing to uncover the truth, he finds that the quiet ranching community has become a booming mining town. Newfound wealth has not made Rafter a peaceful place, however, and the smell of fear and greed is thick in the air.

Hopalong rides into a firestorm of violence and betrayal. On the rain-drenched trail to the lawless town of Seven Pines, Hopalong discovers two men - one dead, the other badly wounded. Returning with medical help, Hopalong finds the wounded man has been shot through the temple. Who would commit such a murder? To find out, Hopalong hires on at Bob Ronson’s Rocking R Ranch and fights to save the Rocking R, only to find himself the target of a ruthless gunman in a life-and-death struggle for frontier justice.

The Indians around Fort Laramie, Wyoming are peaceful. Or so it has seemed - until killers ambush a detail of U.S. soldiers and an officer's wife. One man, an ambitious cavalry officer, flees the carnage and lives to tell the story - his own story, an outright lie. When Duff MacCallister and a few brave men go after the attackers, they discover the officer's wife is very much alive and at the cold merciless hands of the sadistic warrior Yellow Hawk.

When beautiful Angelina Foley presents Tom Radigan with a Spanish grant and claims ownership of his land, he realizes he's up against a cunning and deadly opportunist. Foley wants him off Vache Creek immediately, and with 3,000 head of cattle, an outfit of hardcase gunfighters, and winter coming on, she is unwilling to take no for an answer.

In December 1850, the dark hours before dawn make 12-year-old Patrick O’Connell shiver. He lives with his mother and older sister in a wet and drafty shack. Patrick has been the man of the family ever since Da, his father, sailed from Ireland to America. But now he has a problem he can’t solve: there isn’t enough money to pay the rent.

Tell Sackett had fought his share of Indians and managed to take something of value from his battles: a deep and abiding respect. But that respect is lost when Apache braves kidnap his nephew, forcing Tell to cross the border into the Sierra Madres to bring the boy back. What troubles Tell more, though, is the boy’s mother: Could she possibly be inventing a rescue mission to deliver her husband’s brother into an ambush?

Filled with exciting tales of the frontier, the chronicle of the Sackett family is perhaps the crowning achievement of one of our greatest storytellers. In Treasure Mountain, Louis L'Amour delivers a robust story of two brothers searching to learn the fate of their missing father, and finding themselves in a struggle just to stay alive.

In one swift moment, a fall wiped away his memory. All he knew for certain was that someone wanted him dead - and that he had better learn why. But everywhere he turned there seemed to be more questions - or people too willing to hide the truth behind a smoke screen of lies. He had only the name he had been told was his own, his mysterious skill with a gun, and a link to a half million dollars’ worth of buried gold as evidence of his past life. Was the treasure his? Was he a thief? A killer? He didn’t have the answers, but he needed them soon. Because what he still didn’t know about himself, others did....

Hopalong rode into cattle country just east of the California line looking for his old friend Red Connors. He found Red holed up in a mountain cave with a bullet in his side and a story to tell. The ranchers around Tascotal had been losing their stock, and when Red caught the rustlers in the act, they hunted him down, shot him, and left him for dead. Jack Bolt, a savage, ruthless killer, has brought in a tough band of hardcases to run his operation.