Western Fiction

Framed for murder, Dewey "Mac" McKenzie is running for his life. Though Mac's never even made a pot of coffee, he talks his way onto a cattle drive heading west as a chuckwagon cook. Turns out he has a natural talent for turning salt pork and dried beans into culinary gold. He's as good with a pot and pan as he is with a gun, which comes in handy on a dangerous trail drive beset with rustlers, hostile Indians, ornery weather, and deadly stampedes. Mac can hold his own with any cowboy twice his age. At least until the real showdown begins . . .

In the late 1930s, 16-year-old Billy Parham captures a she-wolf that has been marauding his family's ranch. But instead of killing it, he decides to take it back to the mountains of Mexico. With that crossing he begins an arduous and often dreamlike journey into a country where men meet ghosts and violence strikes as suddenly as heat lightning - a world where there is no order "save that which death has put there".

Mattie Ross, a 14-year-old girl from Dardanelle, Arkansas, sets out to avenge her Daddy who was shot to death by a no-good outlaw. Mattie convinces one-eyed "Rooster" Cogburn, the meanest U.S. marshal in the land, to ride along with her. In True Grit, we have a true American classic, as young Mattie, as vital as she is innocent, outdickers and outmaneuvers the hard-bitten men of the trail in a legend that will last through the ages.

In this taut, chilling audiobook, Lester Ballard - a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape - haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.

James Crowley met his mortal end in a hail of gunfire. Now, he finds himself in purgatory, serving the White Throne to avoid falling to hell. Not quite undead, though not alive either, the best he can hope for is to work off his servitude and fade away. His not-so-sacred duty as a Hand of God? Use his new abilities to hunt down demonic beings that have infiltrated the mortal realm. This time, the White Throne has sent him to the middle of nowhere: a Western town called Dead Acre with a saloon, a moldy church, and little else worth talking about. There isn’t even a sheriff.

The stronger the alpha, the greater the danger. Moon madness could claim me any time now. I’ve looked all over the continent, gone to mating games, but I still haven’t found the she-wolf meant to be mine. I’ve already become too feral in bed. I’m not safe - not for random females. Especially not the one who just moved into the ranch next door. She’s way too tempting. And I’m way too dangerous. I have to stay away. I don’t dare get near her. Because I would die before I ever let anything harm the little human. Including me.

Outer Dark is a novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set is an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother's child, a boy; he leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes. Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong toward an eerie, apocalyptic resolution.

When it was first published in 1979, this novel introduced inspirational fiction to people hungry for well-told stories based on Christian values. Since then, over a million copies have been sold, and it has been made into a popular Hallmark movie. Janette Oke has won the Christy Award, the Gold Medallion, and scores of other awards.

Louis L'Amour said that the West was no place for the frightened or the mean. It was a "big country needing big men and women to live in it". The two stories in this collection provide a good sample of the kinds of people he had in mind.

La vie de Catherine est à New York et la propriété dont elle a hérité est à Bridgewater, dans le Montana. En retournant dans la ville qu’elle visitait enfant, chaque été, des souvenirs enfouis depuis longtemps refont surface ainsi que son désir pour non pas un, mais deux, adolescents désormais devenus de vigoureux cow-boys. Les deux cousins Jack et Sam Kane. Heureusement pour elle, à Bridgewater, un cow-boy en cache toujours un autre.

Règle N°1 de la meute: Ne jamais rien révéler à un humain. J’ai enfreint cette règle le jour où j’ai rencontré la belle doctoresse. Je suis peut-être un champion de rodéo, mais un seul regard sur elle et j’ai perdu ma concentration. Le taureau m’a éjecté et m’a encorné, et maintenant la belle femelle est après moi. Quand j’ai guéri en quelques heures, elle a su que quelque chose clochait.

Audie Award, Literary Fiction, 2016. The story of Jack Crabbe, raised by both a white man and a Cheyenne chief. As a Cheyenne, Jack ate dog, had four wives, and saw his people butchered by General Custer's soldiers. As a white man, he participated in the slaughter of the buffalo and tangled with Wyatt Earp.

On m’appelle peut-être Sir Loin de bœuf, mais quand je vois Kaitlyn pour la première fois, plantez une fourchette dans ma peau, je suis cuit? Mais je ne la revendiquerai pas seul. Jed Cassidy et moi partageons tout et cela l’inclut. Si l’adorable petite bibliothécaire n’est pas prête à être prise par deux champions du rodéo, alors nous devrons la dompter doucement et lentement. Elle est à nous. Nous la séduirons - corps et âme - et quand cela sera fait? Eh bien, disons juste que nous la chevaucherons avec ardeur.

Some young ladies marry for money and social standing, a few lucky ones marry for love - but Tiffany Warren is marrying to end a feud. Honoring her mother’s promise, Tiffany reluctantly travels west to meet her estranged father and his enemy’s eldest son, rancher Hunter Callahan. Once the Warrens and the Callahans are united by marriage, both clans will stop squabbling over a disputed strip of land. In the chaos of a train robbery Tiffany seizes a golden opportunity. By assuming the identity of her father’s new housekeeper she can live with the father she never knew and assess his true character, as well as that of the neighboring cowboy to whom she is betrothed.

I’m the only Dixon brother to step up when our family crumbled. When I took over the ranch, I lost everything, career included. My heart hadn’t been in it anyway. It couldn’t. A girl stole it a dozen years ago when she left, dreaming of a world outside our small town. Now she’s back. Different hair. New style. Kid clutching her hand. Wrecked by the man who put the ring on her finger. Not a trace of the Madison Black I knew.

The little town of No-Name, Colorado is jubilant when they strike gold there, until every no-account degenerate and desperado for hundreds of miles shows up on their doorstep. It's up to mountain Man Smoke Jensen and his over-the-hill companions to save the town's bacon, and do their best not to get killed in the process.

No one remembered when he'd come to the mountains - it seemed that Preacher had always been there. He'd seen a great deal in the unmapped mountains and forests of the grand North American frontier. In fact, he'd just told a friend that he wasn't surprised by anything anymore. But Preacher hadn't seen Nova Roma yet. Suddenly, Preacher is faced with the strangest, most dangerous army the High Lonesome has ever seen. It's leader is a blood-mad fanatic right out of the ancient history books. All Preacher's got on his side are his brother mountain men.

Opening in the settlement of Long Grass, Texas - not quite in Kansas, and nearly New Mexico - we encounter the taciturn Wyatt, whiling away his time in between bottles, and the dentist-turned-gunslinger Doc, more adept at poker than extracting teeth. Now hailed as heroes for their days of subduing drunks in Abilene and Dodge - more often with a mean look than a pistol - Wyatt and Doc are living out the last days of a way of life that is passing into history, two men never more aware of the growing distance between their lives and their legends.

As the father of a young Crow tribesman, Preacher would like nothing more than to see the long-time natives and newly arrived settlers live together in peace. Then, the killing starts.... As a family man and frontiersman, Jamie Ian MacCallister is more than happy to help the officers at Fort Kearny negotiate a peace treaty with the Crow nation. Until it all goes to hell.... This is not the American dream they were looking for. This is a nightmare. A brutal, blood-drenched frontier war that two heroic men must fight and win - or one struggling nation will never come together.

Kylie Wilde fought in the Civil War dressed as a boy and now she's homesteading as a man. But she makes one lousy man! When land agent Aaron Masterson comes to inspect her claim, he immediately realizes she's a woman. She begs him not to tell, but can he in good conscience defraud the U.S. government, even if she really did serve in the war? Aaron is interested in the little spitfire from the moment her long hair falls from her cap, but when he tells her of his plan to stake his own claim, farther west and up in the mountains, she draws away.