Literary Fiction Western

The day Jingo rode into Tower Creek, the town was busy celebrating its 20th anniversary. The big event of the festival was a high-stakes poker game in Joe Slade's saloon with Wally Rankin holding most of the chips. But it didn't take long for Jingo to figure out why: Rankin was cheating. And it would only take a couple of well-placed bullets to reveal it to the others in the room.

This audiobook contains two of legendary Western author Max Brand's short novels for your listening pleasure. The Valley of Jewels: Doc Willis, despite the nickname, is just an unemployed cowboy in Daggett Valley, a place that holds many secrets from the past - including a now-deserted mining camp. When Buck Logan lures Willis to the camp with the promise of great riches, Doc doesn't even suspect he is about to play a part in a most subtle feat of deception.

After five years of virtual banishment because he sold out his small outfit to the Middle Arizona Cattle Company, giving it a foothold on the Mesa Grande range, violent-tempered Joe Bonnyman is summoned back to Lodgepole by his father when it appears that a cattle war between the syndicate and the various rangers is imminent. During his short stay in town, Joe has an unpleasant meeting with Ed Merrill, the brother of a girl Joe had once courted.

Reece Canby, owner of the Diamond RC, spent years as a youngster on the nearby Mescalero Apache reservation. By treaty Chief Antone's Mescalero tribe owns the Sentinel Basin. Now this grazing land is desired by Sax Starke and Chelso DeLacca of the Teepee spread in order for them to expand their cattle herd. The first step in their plan is to stir up trouble with the Mescaleros so that the federal government will have to intervene.

In 1909, struggling to farm his remote homestead and raise three sons, widower Oliver Milliron desperately needs help. A housekeeper’s ad in a Milwaukee newspaper, “Can’t cook but doesn’t bite,” leads him to hire her sight unseen. When perky Rose Llewellyn arrives, she brings along her brainy brother, Morris. Though Rose whistles through her work at the Milliron house, and Morris becomes teacher at the one-room school, these two newcomers conceal a past that is colorful and infamous.

Wilson is willing to pay Cole $5,000 to help get back his wife, Lenora, who has been taken hostage by Lucky Jack Dancer, an outlaw who had robbed the train on which she was a passenger. She is being held prisoner in Gun Town, a safe haven for outlaws. Cole had sided with Lucky Jack Dancer years ago when both of them had operated as US marshals in the Indian Nations, but that was before Lucky Jack had quit the service and become an outlaw.

Retired US Army sergeant Thaddeus McCallum joins the Pinkerton Detective Agency, where he makes enough money to purchase the ranch he's always wanted. But just as McCallum begins to settle in to his new life, he receives an urgent letter from a former comrade in arms, whose son Jeff has gone missing. The men soon learn that Columbus, New Mexico, was the site of an attack by Pancho Villa and his army of revolutionaries, and young Jeff has been taken prisoner.

Katherine Galloway knew this moment of calm wouldn't last, blown away like the dandelion seeds she scattered as a girl. In 1880, three years after her husband's death, she struggles to run an Oregon boardinghouse and raise two girls alone. Things don't get easier when her critical, domineering mother moves in. Katherine must make the situation work, but standing up for herself and her family while honoring her mother isn't easy. And with a daughter entering the teenage years, the pressure on Katherine becomes close to overwhelming.

Doc Blaine must drive 3,000 head of cattle from Texas to Kansas, and needs his sons Jared and Miles to help. Unfortunately, his sons are in love with the same woman - and have vowed to kill each other on sight.

Spring Warren breaks onto the literary scene with a remarkable debut novel. This often comic picaresque follows Edward Turrentine Bayard III, who deserts his upper-class family and moves to Nebraska. Soon he finds trouble - and a Pinkerton agent following his every move.

Autumn, 1837. Blazing onward from the eastern shores, to Missouri, the legendary wagon train sent by U.S. President Andrew Jackson has reached the last outpost of civilization. Now five hundred strong, these brave pioneers set a course across the great rolling plains toward the treacherous Rockies, hoping to stake a claim in the American West. Led by their new wagon master, “Whip” Holt, they must unite as a team if they are to survive, despite their vast differences.

When Jack McLaughlin drifted into Springwater, he carried little more with him than his bitter memories of the Civil War and the shattering secret of a promise betrayed in the heat of battle. Wounded soul-deep, and fearing the wrath of his own parents, Jack has hidden his identity and come to Springwater to see his mother and father from afar, even if he can't bear to face them. Taking odd jobs and keeping a low profile, Jack finds a safe haven at the town's new rooming house.

The year is 1910. Halley's Comet has just signaled the end of the world, and Jack Johnson has knocked out the "Great White Hope", Jim Jeffries. Keystone, West Virginia, is the region's biggest boomtown, and on a rainy Sunday morning in August, its townspeople are gathered in a red-light district known as Cinder Bottom to witness the first public hanging in over a decade. Abe Baach and Goldie Toothman are at the gallows, awaiting their execution.

The separate lives of these driven men and independent women from Europe and America are drawn to a common destiny that beckons seductively from the wild and remote flanks of the American West.

Ten years after the Seventh Cavalry massacred more than 200 Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, J. B. Bennett, a white rancher, and Star, a young Native American woman, are murdered in a remote meadow on J. B.'s land. The deaths bring together the scattered members of the Bennett family.

Spur Award finalist Henry Chappell writes compelling historical novels set in the Old West. In Blood Kin, he tells the story of Isaac Webb, a Texas Ranger caught up in the conflicts surrounding the fledgling Texas Republic. Tensions between the Texans and Comanches begin to mount, and Isaac is sent to negotiate a peace treaty. But, his efforts are hampered by threats of violence and bloodshed.

After a prostitute is murdered at the Easy Nickel saloon, Texas Ranger Josiah Wolfe finds his best friend, Scrap Elliot, in jail and wrongly accused. A strangely familiar horse and a mysterious code are the only clues Josiah has to prove his friend's innocence and save him from execution. Once a Yankee reporter gets involved, Josiah is led to Blanche Dumont's House of Pleasures, where he learns of a thieving, jail-broken accountant with strange ties to both the Easy Nickel and the town's wealthiest banker. With a new railroad line blazing into town, everyone - especially the arrogant young sheriff - is determined to clean up Austin.

Arizona Ranger Sam Burrack is headed for Yuma, escorting Harvey "Cisco" Lang to prison and Adele Simpson to safety. He knows full well of their shared romantic history, and even though Adele swears she's done with Cisco, Burrack is keeping a hard eye on her as well as on the outlaw. But his companions are the least of his worries. A ruthless cattle baron has put a five-thousand-dollar price on Burrack's head - and every low-life bounty hunter and bandit across the Painted Desert is looking to claim it…

Like father, like son. Arizona Territory Ranger Sam Burrack rides the border badlands to Iron Point hoping to capture Ozzie Cord, a mercenary who killed a sheriff back in Mesa Grande. Cord escaped jail once but won't get away this time.... But as Sam nears his prey, the trail of scalped bodies makes it clear that someone else has a vendetta.

It had been raining for weeks. Maybe months. He had forgotten the last day that it hadn't rained, when the storms gave way to the pale blue of the Gulf sky, when the birds flew and the clouds were white and sunshine glistened across the drenched land. Following years of catastrophic hurricanes, the Gulf Coast - stretching from the Florida panhandle to the western Louisiana border - has been brought to its knees. The region is so punished and depleted that the government has drawn a new boundary ninety miles north of the coastline.