Mystery Western Historical Fiction

What happens when a Korean War vet recovering from serious injuries wins a ghost town in a contest, meets a hard-riding, gun-toting cowgirl, and is threatened by three dangerous people all within a few days? Answer: cock-eyed characters, pixilated dialogue, zany romance, and heart-stopping suspense. Thus begins one of Clarence Budington Kelland's finest and rarest novels, previously only published as a seven-part serial in the legendary and best-selling magazine of its era, The Saturday Evening Post.

In 1875, the Devil paid a visit to the town of Crooked Creek, Colorado.The townsfolk didn't think much of his visit then. Now, 10 years later, he's back. And he's got one hell of an agenda.

Malcolm Theodore Puddle is a 21-year shipping clerk - from way back East. What is he doing out here? The Mountain Man's former neighbor, Humbolt Puddle, has died and left his crumbling 600-acre ranch to his only living heir, just as a greedy and ruthless cattle baron is circling the Humbolt ranch like a ravenous vulture. Poor, unsuspecting Puddle is walking into a death trap. Smoke is the not the pitying kind. But any enemy of Smoke's neighbor is his enemy, too: kill-crazy hired gunmen are threatening the whole valley, and good men are dying....

Adelaide Willowby is having a bad day. It’s a week before Christmas, and she has just kicked out the love of her life. Her sister and her daughter are barely speaking to her, one of her best girls is getting married, and ownership of the Wylder County Social Club is in jeopardy. Now she has landed in jail—for 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.

The Civil War may be over, but in this thrilling historical novel, the battle for the West is only just beginning. Wolves of Eden sets four men on a deadly collision course in a haunting narrative that explores the cruelty of warfare and the resilience of the human spirit.

Spanning the years of the first great settlement of the west, The Removes tells the intertwining stories of 15-year-old Anne Cummins, frontierswoman Libbie Custer, and Libbie’s husband, the Civil War hero George Armstrong Custer. When Anne survives a surprise attack on her family’s homestead, she is thrust into a difficult life she never anticipated - living among the Cheyenne as both a captive and, eventually, a member of the tribe. Libbie, too, is thrown into a brutal, unexpected life when she marries Custer.

If Lauralee had her way, all the saloons in the great Northwest would be closed down. Her crusade was successful - except for the prosperous saloon that McCallum was determined to save from her indignation. But their conflict could not quell their growing attraction for each other. Slowly the proud, powerful man melted Lauralee's defiant heart...yet as she surrendered to a rich and wild desire, her joy was shadowed by the haunting mystery of McCallum's brother's death...a mystery whose shocking outcome could forever destroy their love!

Bold, breathtaking, and beautiful, the Australian outback calls to Lesley Holleck like no other site on the continent. The young firebrand soon realizes, however, that the untamed region could exact a brutal price from all who dare enter it. Disguised as a rowdy jackaroo with a special talent for taming horses, she earns the admiration and respect of the people who help her survive there and forever change her world, including Zachary Cooper, who longs to tame Lesley's wild heart.

St. Louis in 1880 is full of ghosts - mangled soldiers, tortured slaves, the innocent victims of war - and Jacob Tracy can see them all. Ever since Antietam, when he lay delirious among the dead and dying, Trace has been haunted by the country's restless spirits. The curse cost him his family, his calling to the church, and damn near his sanity. He stays out of ghost-populated cities as much as possible these days, guiding wagon trains west with his pragmatic and skeptical partner, Boz.

Before the Civil War, Argyle Dollarhyde had everything a man could ever want: a beautiful wife, three strong sons, and a prosperous stake in the booming cotton industry. But now Union troops have left the South in ruins - and Dollarhyde's life is in shambles. Refusing to fall prey to carpetbaggers, Dollarhyde gathers up his family and sets out for the one place a man can still live free: Texas. Where the natives are as dangerous as the land itself.

Zane Grey wrote this splendidly thrilling sequel to Riders of the Purple Sage in 1915, but for almost 90 years it has existed in a profoundly censored version. At last, the real story can be told.

Drawn to a killing ground... Ten thousand dollars. That's the bounty on the head of the most hated man in Texas - the man Flintlock has been hired to guard. The crime was the brutal murder of a young schoolteacher. The verdict was not guilty for lack of evidence. And the suspected killer's first guard was murdered by a shotgun blast.

When Zekial Broome stops a sadistic slave chaser, Grissum McCord, from whipping his captive, he and the girl have no choice but to flee west into the untamed lands of the wild frontier. If they can make it to the Green River country, no one will ever find them. What they don't count on is McCord. With a 500-dollar bounty at stake and revenge in his heart, he'll follow them to hell and back, for as long as it takes. He's murdered before, but the revenge he plans for the buckskin-clad Broome would make a strong man quail.

After an attempted horse theft goes tragically wrong, 16-year-old Caleb Bentley is on the run with his mean-spirited older brother across the American Southwest at the turn of the 20th century. Caleb’s moral compass and inner courage will be tested as they travel the harsh terrain and encounter those who have carved out a life there, for good or ill.

Western Missouri. Former army scout Jack Gregory returns from battle to a homestead in ruins. A wanted man with no place to go, he chooses an even deadlier career - as a scout for General George Armstrong Custer. Under a new name, Jack serves bravely in the Seventh Cavalry. But when Custer's disastrous leadership ends in devastating slaughter, Jack sets off to forge his own destiny.

In the waning days of the Wild West, Texas rancher Charles Abner Sunday wants to leave a legacy of the Old West to his grandson Henry-Ellis. Sunday buys 300 head of Texas longhorn cattle and leads his grandson - along with a ragtag crew of cronies and misfits - on an old-fashioned cross-country cattle drive. As the drovers struggle to push their 300 charges across a swiftly changing American frontier, they butt heads with a Colorado meatpacker hell-bent on living in the wild, wild past.

Calvin Sidey - steely, hardened, with his own personal code - is one of the last cowboys. It's the 1960s, and he's living off the grid in a trailer on the prairie when his adult son, Bill, seeks his help. A mostly absentee father and grandfather, Calvin nevertheless agrees to stay with his grandchildren for a week. He decamps for his son's house in the small town where he once was a mythic figure, and soon enough problems arise: A boy's attentions to 17-year-old Ann are increasingly aggressive, and a group of reckless kids portend danger for 11-year-old Will.

Ranger Burrack and Federal Marshal Summers must battle Arizona regulator Morgan Waite and his band of vigilantes. When Burrack and Summers apprehend Cold Devil's saloon owner Jack Spain, Spain offers $10,000 to anyone who frees him. Getting wind of Spain's reward, Waite and his posse bushwhack the lawmen and leave them for dead in a terrifying landslide. But blazing gunfire will soon heat up the town of Cold Devil.

Lonzo Greer and his Black Moon gang are leaving a blood-soaked trail on the unforgiving desert sands of the Arizona Territory, and they've got a personal vendetta against ranger Sam Burrack. But, with the lethal precision of his bonehandled Colt, Sam's as formidable as any of the Black Moon boys, and he's got an equally deadly partner in ranger Hadley Jones.