Western Crime Fiction

It was a chance for a new beginning and a better life for a wagon train of hopefuls leaving the war-torn South to relocate in Kansas. Unfortunately, new enemies and old habits die hard, and the truth can come to mean very little. Out-manned and out-gunned, Ruben, Marion, and Homer put their lives on the line as they saddle up and fight for what is right on the Glory Trail.

Brendan Early and Dana Moon have tracked renegade Apaches together and gunned down scalp hunters to become Arizona legends. But now they face each other from opposite sides of what newspapers are calling The Rincon Mountain War. Brendan and a gang of mining company gun thugs are dead set on running Dana and "the People of the Mountain" from their land.

Eli Singer, a rancher and poet in remote Eastern Montana, sees his life upended when a long-buried corpse - which turns out to be a murder victim from Eli's childhood - erodes out of a hillside on his property. This discovery forces Eli to turn inward to revisit the tragic events in his past that led to a life-changing moment of violence, while at the same time he must reach outside himself toward Chloe, a literary agent from New York whom he is falling in love with.

On a bloody day in 1887, death came to Blanco, Texas. Before the sun went down, the livery stable was torched, an outlaw gang robbed the bank, two men were killed, and young newlywed Ellie Taine was raped. One of the dead was the man who planned the robbery - the son of dying, legendary Texas Ranger Jonathan Crossland - the other was Ellie's husband, an innocent bystander.

When a legendary old gunslinger finally meets his Maker in some godforsaken West Texas town, Stringer heads to the scene for what he thinks is a routine story. But when he gets to Comanche Woe, it turns out he's landed in the middle of a dust storm of trouble. It's open season on wanted men. A wily varmint called Buckskin Jack Blair has crowned himself Marshal. And murderous vigilantes and bounty hunters are crawling out of the woodwork. When the bullets start flying, Stringer can't tell the outlaws from the lawmen…

This book is a work of fiction that tells the story of the first gold strike in the Montana Territory along Willow Creek in 1862. The gold camp grew to over 10,000 people, and Bannack became the first capitol of the Territory of Montana. My story tells about the lives of the four gold miners that made the strike, and it recounts the many hardships endured by the men and women living in a gold camp in the high mountains.

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.

Zac discovers that certain vigilantes are controlled by corrupt federal officials. He aims to bring them in, but the price for justice may be terribly steep this time.

Hopalong Cassidy, the iconic western cowboy hero conceived by Clarence Mulford, was immortalized in a highly popular film series starring William Boyd from 1935-1948. A tough-talking and violent character in print, Hopalong Cassidy was remade into a clean-cut screen hero who roamed the West with his sidekicks and fought villains who took advantage of the weak. Here Cassidy is drawn as Mulford originally conceived; rough-and-tumble, foul-mouthed, and thriving on brawls and gunplay.

In the winter of 1897, a trio of killers descends upon an isolated farm in upstate New York. Midwife Elspeth Howell returns home to the carnage: her husband and four of her children, murdered. Before she can discover her remaining son, Caleb, alive and hiding in the kitchen pantry, another shot rings out over the snow-covered plains. Twelve-year-old Caleb nurses his mother back to health, cleaning her wounds and keeping her fed, before they leave their home to seek retribution on the men who committed this heinous crime.

Before he set down his pen, seven-time Spur Award winner Elmer Kelton—the Western Writers of America’s “Best Western Writer of All Time”—cut 50 notches on his gunbelt of classics. In this final novel of the Texas Rangers, a young lawman finds his mettle put to the test while bringing justice to a remote settlement. To stop a series of baffling killings and thefts, newly married ranger Andy Pickard is dispatched to a central Texas community where locals are quick to pin the crimes on two feuding cattlemen.

In the wake of Fourth of July fireworks in Montana's Madison Valley, Hyalite County sheriff Martha Ettinger and Deputy Sheriff Harold Little Feather investigate a horrific scene at the Palisades cliffs, where a herd of bison have fallen to their deaths. Victims of blind panic caused by the pyrotechnics, or a ritualistic hunting practice dating back thousands of years? The person who would know is beyond asking, an Indian man found dead among the bison, his leg pierced by an arrow.

John Stuart Tapscott, after service to the Confederacy and his home state of Virginia, heads westward to find a life that doesn't resemble a mockery of everything he's ever known. After brief stops, he finds himself an adopted member of a small band of Osage that have wandered to Texas. A series of events thereafter display the necessity to him of his leaving his new family and trekking further.

There was only one female marshal in the Indian Nations under Judge Issac Parker...Deputy US Marshal F.M. Miller. She teams up with Bass Reeves in Bass and the Lady and goes undercover to stop a new gang of murdering rustlers. Bass has an arrest warrant for his own son...for murder.

A taunting text from a serial killer gives FBI agent Nolan Dalton only minutes to save the next victim. Former cop Adalyn Baxter—and Nolan’s ex-girlfriend—receives the same message. That’s just the beginning of a cunningly orchestrated plan that unearths a shocking secret about Nolan. As the Texas lawman struggles to come to terms with his past and protect Adalyn, a madman’s end game could bury them both.

After fastball phenom Prospero Stark's baseball career craters in a Mexican jail, he retreats to a trailer park in the scorching Arizona desert. He lives in peaceful anonymity with a collection of colorful outcasts until someone leaves his former catcher's severed hand on his doorstep. Beautiful, hard-living reporter Roxanne Santa Cruz, who keeps a .380 Colt and a bottle of Chivas in her car, joins Stark to help him uncover his friend's fate, a dangerous pursuit that pits them against a ruthless gang of drug-dealing killers.

Ted Sweeney. Affable everyman in small-town Montana. Tailgate hung on with baling wire, owner of his own business. Ten minutes ago, his biggest worry had been how to pay for the engagement ring rattling around in his pocket. But that was before he came home to find a corpse tidily arranged in his favorite recliner, his "old pal of a piece of furniture". Is it a warning or a setup or what? Sweeney can't help but admire the efficiency of the work, the slice deep across the guy's throat. Somebody knew what they were doing.

Small ranchers in Harmony, Oregon, are up against it with the price of cattle down and Skull Ranch, owned by a syndicate, trying to buy them out. Dan Riley spends a month trying to find a bank to help them, but he fails. When the editor of The Clarion is shot, the ranchers blame Black Mike Sand, the manager of Skull, in spite of the circumstances of the shooting. As pressure mounts, Riley is determined to find out who is really in charge of the syndicate, and the only man willing to help him is Andrew Daniels, a former newspaper man whose courage comes from a bottle.

Sgt. Bren Allred has seen all manner of criminality in beautiful Graham County, Arizona. He has managed to keep the worst of it from his wife, Monica, who is having a troubled pregnancy. But it will be difficult to keep the devils at bay as a new kind of trouble erupts across the region . When deputies Sanchez and Haley go undercover to investigate a rash of copper theft, they unwittingly stumble across a shadowy spy network. Meanwhile, Apache Police Sgt. Al Victor is confronted by a murder case involving a diplomat as he grapples with the ever-present problem of alcohol on the reservation.

A tale of two crimes in the twenty-first century: In the rugged ranch country of eastern Arizona, Graham County Deputy Branden Allred and San Carlos Tribal Police Officer Allen Victor are investigating the death of a young Apache. At first it appears to be a freak accident, a conclusion the Sheriff likes, but the officers begin to suspect murder. Motive is the major missing element, and nothing makes sense until a one-hundred-year old unsolved crime comes to light.