Mystery Western Historical Fiction

Authors of over 200 books combined, William W. and J.A. Johnstone write action-packed tales of Western life. In Rampage of the Mountain Man, a job offer to deliver 3,000 head of cattle sounds like just the payday Smoke Jensen needs. But when an angry Cheyenne warrior attacks him and his comrades, Smoke discovers that he's not the only one looking to cash in.

The year is 1823, and the trappers of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company live a brutal frontier life. Hugh Glass is among the company's finest men, an experienced frontiersman and an expert tracker. But when a scouting mission puts him face-to-face with a grizzly bear, he is viciously mauled and not expected to survive. Two company men are dispatched to stay behind and tend to Glass before he dies. When the men abandon him instead, Glass is driven to survive by one desire: revenge.

Elam Eskers lives his days in peace on his ranch in the small town of Phoenix, Oregon, with his ranch hand, Samson, and his dog, Dusk, keeping him company. Gone are the days when he was the man outlaws feared the most. When he doesn't seek trouble, though, it finds him. Quincy Meiner has a hunger for money. He will stop at nothing to steal the land that belongs to Elam and his neighbors. At first, Meiner is just a nuisance. But when the Meiner gang kill Elam's dog, terrorize his town and kidnap Roxanna, the only woman Elam has ever loved, it becomes personal.

A killer is on the loose in the Arizona Territory. One by one, Tonto Basin ranchers are being murdered for their livestock -and the Cattle Raisers Association has hired two range detectives to catch the culprit. From the looks of them, Stovepipe Stewart and Wilbur Coleman are just another pair of high plains drifters. But with their razor-sharp detective skills and rare talent for trouble, they’re the last remaining hope for one young cowboy who’s been arrested for the murders.

One man finds himself torn between two cultures in this sweeping tale of frontier life in post–Civil War era Texas. In the years following the American War Between the States, the once vacated military presence in west Texas is on the rise to protect the waves of settlers moving into the region. Living peaceably with the Mescalero Apache, half-breed former military scout Holton Lang promotes the tentative harmony between the US cavalry and the Native American population.

In Phoenix, a sheriff guns down a banker and robs him of a document. Going to the banker's aid, a witness hears the dying man's last words and takes hold of the map the sheriff was really after. By the time the crooked lawman realizes he has the wrong document, Jolene Wellington is on the run - and framed for the murder of the banker.

Higbee, Colorado, population 147, is about to become a boomtown. The visionary General Wade Garrison is building a railroad to connect Higbee to the renowned Santa Fe Rail. But a rancher named Ike Clinton has his own selfish reasons for making sure these bands of steel go nowhere - and he’ll go to any lengths to derail Garrison’s plans. Falcon MacCallister owes a war-time debt to the General and answers the call to aid the man in his fight with the Clinton brood.

For Frank Morgan, a reunion with his estranged son brings back bittersweet memories of another time and place. Conrad Morgan is an Eastern businessman trying to build a railroad through an untamed corner of New Mexico Territory. Even though Frank has revenge-hungry killers on his trail, his kin needs him now. So with a gun-toting, hard-loving beauty named Rebel by their side, father and son ride straight into a pitched battle with hired killers and furious Apache warriors. It’s a firestorm more treacherous and evil than Frank Morgan has ever faced.

Macon Fallon had never needed more than a deck of cards, a fast horse, and a ready gun; he was counting on those things now as he led an unsuspecting group of settlers to an abandoned mining town. But while Fallon prepared to pass the ghost town off as a gold mine in the making, a funny thing happened: a real-life community started to take shape in the town he’d christened Red Horse. So when a band of vicious outlaws and a kid who fancied himself a gunslinger threatened to rip Red Horse apart, Fallon found himself caught in one predicament he’d never gambled on.

Businessman Conrad Browning is desperate enough to hire his estranged father, quick-draw Frank Morgan, to neutralize the trouble plaguing his New Mexico railroad line. As the unlikely pair rides to the remote railroad site, they outshoot vengeful bushwhackers and hostile Apaches. But just as Frank and his son begin to bond, a criminal mastermind designs an evil plan to kill them both. And when a gorgeous young lady stumbles into their camp one night, they soon find themselves under her disarming spell.

He was 15 when he killed his first man. Before his murderous ways ended, Hardin killed 42 men in cold blood - one, the legend goes, because he snored too loudly. From then on, John Wesley Hardin stayed true to his calling, killing man after man after man, spending most of his life being pursued by both local lawmen and federal troops.

A wagon train winding through the remote reaches of the Rocky Mountain high country can attract plenty of scavengers - some of them human - like Vic Bedell and his gang of cutthroats. All he wants is the women, who can be traded for gold mine supplies...or used for whatever else he has in mind. But he didn't count on Preacher leading that train.

When Juan Cabrillo fails to capture the leader of Mexico’s most dangerous drug cartel and loses an Oregon crew member in the process, he’s determined to get revenge. Little does he know that the explosion he just narrowly escaped was merely the latest flash of violence from a machine of war that has existed for decades, dating from the bloodiest episode in Armenia’s history.

Business lately has been deadly for Ike Kelly. Recent unexpected gunplay has left his agency to a single operative. John Henry Cole is that operative. Kelly has received a letter from former lover Lydia Winslow, who operates an escort service in the new mining camp of Deadwood in Dakota Territory. "Three young women have been murdered since they arrived in camp." It is obviously a dangerous assignment, and Cole is advised that he must take every precaution - as if he needed such advice.

When gold is discovered near the little town of No-Name, Colorado, the citizens are overjoyed at their good fortune...until trouble gallops down Maine Street on a horse straight out of Hell. For gold's closest companions are greed and murder, and every two-bit gunslick from the Atlantic to the Rockies is beating a path to the gold strike - which is practically on the doorstep of Smoke Jensen. They're looking to get rich quick...and never mind how it's done. But this legendary mountain man never learned how to back away from a good fight - and this one promises to be a whopper.

On the American frontier, every gun tells a story. A boy in Texas waits for a Christmas present he chose from a Montgomery Ward catalog. The present, a brand new, lever action Winchester 1886 and a box of its big .50-caliber slugs, never makes it there. Instead, the rifle is caught up in a train robbery and starts a long and violent journey of its own - from the hands of a notorious, kill-crazy outlaw to an Apache renegade to a hardscrabble rancher and beyond.

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.

If there's anything better than coming home to Texas, it's getting paid to do it. For Scratch Morton and Bo Creel, always on the hunt for funds, the job is taking three vicious criminals from Arkansas to Tyler, Texas for trial. Little do they know that one of the criminals, the one that's a beautiful woman, is the most dangerous of all. Soon the journey home turns into a race for buried treasure, a shoot-out, and another double cross - until Scratch and Bo are making one last mad, bullet-sprayed dash through the land of their birth...or the land of their death....

From the moment they left their homestead unguarded on that scorching Texas day, Martin Pauley and Amos Edwards became searchers. First they had to return to the decimated ranch, bury the bodies of their family, and confront the evil cunning of the Comanche who had slaughtered them. Then they set out in pursuit of missing Debbie Edwards. In the years that follow, Amos and Martin survive storms of nature and of men, seeking more than a missing girl, and more than revenge. Both are driven by secrets, guilt, love, and rage.

Cotton Pickens made it through fifth grade. That and a tin star were good enough to make him the sheriff in the boomtown of Doubtful, Wyoming. And Doubtful's name is no accident. The saying around town is, "If you're a lawman, it's doubtful you'll last a day." Spoiled, brash King Bragg is going to hang for the murder of three men in a barroom. But King's arrogant father - and his beautiful sister - use their powers of persuasion to convince Cotton to look into the shooting.