Western Crime

After hunting down a rogue spy as part of an elite CIA counterespionage unit, Garrett Kohl returns home to Texas in hopes of settling down and carving out a normal life. While learning the ropes of fatherhood, falling deeper in love with his high school crush, and rebuilding his wildfire ravaged cattle ranch, he is approached in secret by an engineer working at a nearby nuclear weapons plant, who is in desperate need of his help.

In this first collection of short pieces, including two novella-length works, since his western anthology Tonto Woman, Leonard demonstrates the superb characterization, dead-on dialogue, vivid atmosphere, and driving plotting that have made him a household name.

Traversing a vivid landscape, from sunblasted hills and canyons to the nighttime streets of America's greatest cities, some of Louis L'Amour's most compelling fiction was set in his own time. Here are tales of innocents caught in the schemes of criminals, detectives hunting down truths that hide more lies, gangsters and beauties, private investigators and cops. Here is a world populated by the kinds of people who risk their lives to right a wrong, make a buck, or save a friend.

Blaze gets a call from ex-US Marshal Mitchell. He has seen two ghosts roaming the streets of San Francisco. The Cady brothers. Ruthless arms traffickers and killers Blaze and his Marshals’ team had taken out two years ago. One brother, Carson, died trying to escape. The other, Dexter, killed a Marshal and barely stayed alive, once Blaze was done with him. Dexter ended on death row, awaiting execution.

Sinead - who is both resilient and vulnerable, insightful and insecure - spends her days supporting her ailing mother and appeasing Emerson, the man who owns her house and the diner where she works. She wants nothing more than to leave the town her own dark history is bound up in, but Emerson asserts his power over her, thwarting her progress at every turn. One day, Tobias, a mysterious rambler from the east coast, walks into the diner, and Sinead makes the impulsive decision to invite him into her life and home.

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.

The leafy Avenue de Foch, one of the most exclusive residential streets in Nazi-occupied France, was Paris' hotbed of daring spies, murderous secret police, amoral informers, and Vichy collaborators. So when American physician Sumner Jackson, who lived with his wife and young son, Phillip, at Number 11, found himself drawn into the Liberation network of the French resistance, he knew the stakes were impossibly high.

After the bloody confrontation in Appaloosa, Everett Hitch heads into the afternoon sun and ends up in Resolution, an Old West town so new the dust has yet to settle. It's the kind of town that doesn't have much in the way of commerce, except for a handful of saloons and some houses of ill repute.

Itching for a challenge, Count Frederick von Hausen sails from Germany to hunt down Smoke Jensen. And with a party of the toughest hardasses in the West, von Hausen shadows Smoke into Wyoming's high Rockies. But Smoke Jensen is the last mountain man, and he knows the country like the back of his hand. He also knows that these doomed backtrailers couldn't have picked a prettier place to be buried.

Big secrets run deep. Former FBI agent Jack McBride took the job as chief of police for Stillwater, Texas, to start a new life with his teenage son, Ethan, away from the suspicions that surrounded his wife's disappearance a year earlier. With a low crime rate and a five-man police force, he expected it to be a nice, easy gig; hot checks, traffic violations, some drugs, occasional domestic disturbances, and petty theft. Instead, within a week he is investigating a staged murder-suicide.

There are some things in this world that can't be stopped. Like progress, a moving train, and the American Dream. When the bigwigs in Washington decide to build a transcontinental railroad to the West Coast, they need a man who's just as unstoppable to clear a path through Mexican territory. That man is Jamie MacCallister. Jamie knows it's a tough job. The territory is overrun with Apaches. The Apaches are gunning for a fight. And the first patrol sent in by the president has already been ambushed, kidnapped, and most likely killed.

Wolves howl as a riderless horse returns at sunset to the Culpepper Dude Ranch in the Madison Valley. The missing woman, Nanika Martinelli, is better known as the Fly Fishing Venus, a red-haired river guide who lures clients the way dry flies draw trout. As Sheriff Martha Ettinger follows hoof tracks in the snow, she finds one of the men who has fallen under the temptress' spell impaled on the antler tine of a giant bull elk, a kill that' s been claimed by a wolf pack. An accident? If not, is the killer human or animal?

Cass Darringer returns from hunting to find his partner murdered, three innocent men hanged, his mustangs stolen, and himself the target of vigilantes. He's saved by Texas Rafferty and her uncle, but ends up in a fiery showdown with ruthless killers.

As a decorated undercover DEA special agent, Garrett Kohl has traveled the world - and fought in most of it - but it’s the High Plains of northwest Texas he calls home and dreams of returning to one day. Kohl is in the middle of an assignment in Afghanistan when his commander orders him back to Texas on a short mission expected to take a week at most. But Kohl is unsettled to discover that he’s moving from one kind of war to another.

Sheriff Martha Ettinger reunites with once-again lover and sometime private detective Sean Stranahan to investigate the death of a woman who was stranded in a spring snowstorm. When a fly wallet is found in a pannier on the saddle of the woman's horse, the leather engraved with the initials EH, Stranahan shows the wallet to Patrick Willoughby, the president of the Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers Club. Only a few days before, Willoughby was approached by a man selling fishing gear that had belonged to a famous outdoorsman and writer.

It's April, but there's still snow on the Montana mountains the day a member of the Madison River Liar and Fly Tiers club finds a Santa hat in the chimney of his rented cabin. With the flue clogged, and desperate to make a fire, he climbs up to the roof only to find the body of a teenage girl wedged into the chimney.

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.

When he kicked off, Florida mob boss Frank DiCilia left his gorgeous widow, Karen, everything, but with strings attached. She loses the millions, the cars, the palatial Gold Coast mansion if she ever gets involved with another man. And there's a crazy cowboy-wannabe thug named Roland who's acting as Frank's eyes beyond the grave, making sure Karen doesn't dally. But now Cal Maguire's come into the picture. A sexy, street-smart Detroit ex-con, Cal's got a line and a scam for every occasion.

Gold. Silver. Cold hard cash. Stagecoach guard Red Ryan and his driver Buttons Muldoon have ridden shotgun on some pretty valuable cargo in their day. But they're about to learn - the hard way - that the most dangerous cargo of all is human. They've been hired to escort a cowardly traitor facing an army court martial in New Orleans. Every hired killer in Texas wants him dead, including gun-handy Hannah Huckabee, a woman with a mysterious past and an agenda of her own. But she's just one of the dangers they'll face along the way.

Smoke Jensen sat in a cave and boiled the last of his coffee. He figured he was in Idaho - somewhere south of Montpelier - but he was certain about only two things: He was cold and he was being hunted by a small army of men. Smoke knew why he was cold - it was winter. He just didn't have a clear idea of why anyone was after him.