Western Action

There’s nothing like a wedding to bring families together. And there’s no place like the Sugarloaf Ranch to throw a foot-stomping hoedown — even if it turns into a gun-blazing showdown. Smoke and Sally Jensen are delighted that their son Louis is marrying the lovely widow he met during a perilous stagecoach journey through the Donner Pass. The whole family welcomes the bride and her young son with open arms. In fact, everyone is invited to the party — even the handsome stranger who rescued Louis’s twin sister Denise from a runaway mustang.

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.

Two-time Spur Award winner and member of the Arkansas Writers Hall of Fame, Dusty Richards pens gritty Western tales packed with period authenticity. Texas Blood Feud stars Chet Byrnes, a third generation Texan looking to save his family’s ranch with one more big cattle drive. But his plans are dashed after he strings up three horse thieves, sparking a deadly feud with a family bent on revenge.

Filled with action, adventure, mystery, and historical detail, the Sackett saga is an unforgettable achievement by one of America's greatest storytellers. In Galloway, two brothers must struggle to survive in a wild and beautiful land to build themselves a ranch and a future.

It’s been 15 years since brothers Michael and Andrew Lewis came from Tennessee to Mexican-run Texas to hunt wild horses. They have settled and found wives, and they’re now joined by their brother and sister, James and Annie. James becomes a volunteer in a fledgling army of rebels led by Sam Houston. Michael and Andrew are separated from their families and each other, being drawn into the conflict as the drive toward independence from the government of Mexico City gains momentum.

In the shadow of the Prophecy Mountains, the ramshackle boomtown of Rattlesnake Wells draws schemers, predators, and desperate pilgrims. As for the law, that’s the town marshal, a former Texas outlaw trying to make a new life for himself. But Sundown Bob Hatfield knows a man who’s slick on the draw can’t escape trouble for long. In Rattlesnake Wells, you fight fire with fire — and a new one has just exploded.

With a handful of murderous rogues, Captain Jed Foster has run off with four wagons containing new Springfield rifles, bayonets, and ammunition meant to resupply the troops at Fort Bowie in Arizona Territory. Foster plans to sell the weapons to the highest bidder — whether it’s Apaches, Mexican revolutionaries, or Confederate veterans who still dream of destroying the Union. But that’s the least of Foster’s problems.

Texas Ranger Rory Yates is not keen for hero status. But it's unavoidable once his girlfriend, country singer Willow Dawes, writes a song about his bravery. Rory escapes his newfound fame when he's sent to the remote West Texas town of Rio Lobo, a municipality with two stoplights. And now, according to the chief of police, it has one too many Texas Rangers. Rio Lobo Detective Ariana Delgado is the one who requested Rory and the only person who believes a local councilwoman's seemingly accidental death is a murder. Then, Rory begins to uncover a tangle of small-town secrets.

William Tell Sackett had followed a different path from his younger brothers, but his name, like theirs, was spoken with respect and just a little fear. Where Orrin had brought law and order from New Mexico to the plains of Montana, backed up by the gunfighting talents of his brother Tye, Tell Sackett's destiny drew him to Texas after he had to kill a man. There, in the high, lonesome country, he came upon a vein of pure gold.

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.

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.

The newspapers call them the Devil's Horde. A well-oiled team of cutthroat bandits who terrorize the Northern Pacific Railway on route to the coast through Dakota Territory. They dynamite the tracks, blow open the express car door, murder the crewmen, rob the passengers, and empty the safe of gold and cash. If Wells Fargo & Company can't find a way to stop the Devil's Horde, there'll be hell to pay. Enter Wolf Stockburn. A tall rangy Scotsman who dresses like a gentleman but shoots like a cowboy, Stockburn learned his craft from a legendary gunfighter.

Everyone was dead. Indian raiders massacred the entire wagon train. Only seven-year-old Hardy Collins and three-year-old Betty Sue Powell, managed to survive. With a knife, a faithful stallion, and the survival lessons his father taught him, Hardy must face the challenges of the open prairie as they head west in search of help. Using ingenuity and common sense, Hardy builds shelters, forages for food, and learns to care for Betty Sue. But their journey through this hostile wilderness is being tracked by even more hostile men.

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.

“If a man won’t fight for what is rightly his, then he ain’t much account.” With this challenge from his dying father, young Shell Tucker rode out after three men who had stolen the twenty thousand dollars his father was carrying. Two of the men he hunted, Doc Sites and Kid Reese, were his friends. Dreaming of adventure, Tucker had wanted to join their gang. But now, with his father gone and the people back home desperately in need of the proceeds from the cattle drive, Shell was determined to uphold his father’s reputation and recover their money.

From one of the greatest storytellers of the American West comes a collection of short stories, including "Death West Bound", "Old Doc Yak", "It's Your Move", "And Proudly Die", "Survival", "Show Me the Way to Go Home", "Thicker Than Blood", "The Admiral", "Shanghai, Not Without Gestures", "The Man Who Stole Shakespeare", "The Dancing Kate", "Off the Mangrove Coast", "Glorious Glorious", "By the Ruins of El Walarieh", "Where There's Fighting", "The Cross and the Candle", "A Friend of the General", "Author's Tea", "Dead End Drift", and "Let Me Forget".

What do you get when you take one stagecoach out of Denver, add a thousand-or-so bullets whizzing past your head, while sitting next to two headless corpses caught in the crossfire? If your name is Lou Prophet, you get revenge. Raucous, rowdy, ruthless revenge. Next question?

David Fitzgerald's award-winning 2010 book, Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed At All, pointed out the top 10 fatal flaws of Christianity's origin story. Now, Jesus: Mything in Action presents the most compelling new findings in Jesus myth theory, critically examines its controversial reception by biblical scholars and the extent and reliability of our sources for Jesus, and reveals the surprising history behind Jesus' evolution.

In the 1870s, Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek "an original relation to nature," drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. One of these men regales Will with tales of the immense buffalo herds hidden away in the Colorado Rockies and convinces him to join an expedition to track them down.

Wyoming Territory, 1873. Tim Colter and his trusted guide, mountain man Jed Reno, are on the trail of a vicious gang of train robbers when they happen upon a bloody and shocking scene. Lying on the ground, barely breathing, a Secret Service agent has been left for dead in the wake of a brutal ambush. His final words: "President Grant . . . assassination . . . Dugan . . . trust nobody."