Western Mystery

Even at 17 years old, Carson Ryan knows enough about cow herding to realize the crew he's with is about the worst ever. They're taking the long way around to the Montana prairies, and they're seriously undermanned. While rounding up strays, Ryan hears gunshots ring across the range. Suspecting an Indian attack, he gallops straight into a US Army raid instead. The outfit he's with is nothing but a bunch of murdering cattle rustlers, and the law thinks he's one of them. Tied up, thrown in jail, and tried by a court that's more interested in hanging a man than learning the truth, Carson has only two options: escape or die trying.

A body burns in the high desert hills. A boy walks into a fire station, pale with the shock of a grisly discovery. A middle school teacher worries when her colleague is late for work. By day's end, when the body is identified as local math teacher Adam Merkel, a small Nevada town will be rocked to its core by a brutal and calculated murder. Adam Merkel left a university professorship in Reno to teach middle school in Lovelock seven months before he died.

Hezekiah Boudreaux’s life is a sequence of surprises. The deputy sheriff in Splendor is still adjusting to the latest twist—being a single father. Hex’s precocious daughter, Lucy, is a handful, and one of two females who bring joy to a life filled with ne'er-do-wells, cons, and rustlers. Christina McKenna is still reeling from the sudden death of her twin. She fills each day taking care of her younger sister while acting as cook and caretaker for Hex Boudreaux and his always active daughter. The problem is, she’s falling in love with her boss.

Louis L'Amour's world is built on those dramatic moments when men and women cast their fears, doubts, and pasts behind them and plunge into the unknown. Nowhere is that more evident than in this latest collection of stories set on the American frontier. These selections include "The Nester and the Piute"; "Big Man"; "Waltz Him Around Again"; "Shadow"; "Barney Takes a Hand"; "When a Texan Takes Over"; and "No Trouble for the Cactus Kid".

Territorial marshals Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch figured things had finally settled down in Appaloosa when Boston Bill Black's murder charge was dropped. But all that changed when Augustus Noble Driggs was transferred to a stateside penitentiary just across the border from Mexico. Square-jawed, handsome, and built like a muscled thoroughbred stallion, Driggs manages to intimidate everyone inside the prison walls, including the upstart young warden.

A lost and frightened horse plods down the National Mall, startling the crowd. When Gabriel Du Pré spots the confused animal, the connection is immediate, for neither of these creatures belongs in the sweltering heat of a DC summer. Du Pré, a Métis Indian from the wilds of Montana, calms the horse and leads it to the nearest policeman. Du Pré is in Washington to play his people’s music for a Smithsonian festival, but after leading the horse to safety, he encounters a murder instead.

Elizabeth Margaret “E.M.” Danniher finds house hunting in Cottonwood County, Wyoming difficult, but deadly? That she never expected. In television, a cold open rolls before the credits, pitching the viewer into the news story. That’s how Elizabeth and her cohorts feel after she finds a body in a house for sale. A victim with a hidden history, few suspects, and the sheriff’s department not happy having Elizabeth - and amateur sleuth thorn in their sides - as the closest thing they have to a witness. Mike, Diana, Tom and the rest jump in to dig in.

Territorial Marshals Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch are back in Appaloosa, where their work enforcing the law has been exceptionally quiet. All that is about to change. An ominous storm rolls in, and along with it a band of night riders with a devious scheme, who show up at the Rio Blanco camp, where a three-hundred-foot bridge is under construction.

They are just about as bad and evil as outlaw gangs come. But in the end, they finally go straight.

The hell called Yuma Prison can destroy the soul of any man. And it's worse for those whose damning crime is the color of their skin. The law says Chiricahua Apache Raymond San Carlos and black-as-night former soldier Harold Jackson are murderers, and they'll stay behind bars until they're dead and rotting. But even in the worst place on earth, there's hope....

Life on the ranchlands of Montana comes with more than its share of trouble. The unique people who live and work on this untamed stretch of today's American West expect it---and some of them even enjoy it. One of them is Mike Wire, a former homicide detective who once worked the decadent hills and valleys of Hollywood.

In Athens, a Boeing 737 noses into the gate, and its crew is suddenly confronted by Greek officials waiting to arrest one of its passengers, a beloved ex-President of the United States, John Harris. Captain Craig Dayton, believing Harris' life is in danger, stages a daring escape by backing the jet away from the gate without clearance and taking off down a vacant runway.

Wrongfully accused of murder, Dr. Catherine Bennett is destined to hang...unless she can disappear. With the untamed territory of Colorado as her most likely refuge, she packs her physician's kit and heads West. But even with a new life and name, a female doctor with a bounty on her head can hide for only so long.

Laura's worst fears have been realized: Kindle has been taken into custody, and she is once again on the run. The noose awaits her in New York, but Laura is realizing that there are some things worse than death. Finally running out of places to hide, it may be time for Dr. Catherine Bennett to face her past.

Imagine a place populated by criminals - people plucked from their lives, with their memories altered, who've been granted new identities and a second chance. Welcome to The Blinds, a dusty town in rural Texas populated by misfits who don't know if they've perpetrated a crime or just witnessed one. What's clear to them is that if they leave, they will end up dead. For eight years, Sheriff Calvin Cooper has kept an uneasy peace - but after a suicide and a murder in quick succession, the town's residents revolt.

Daniel Kaine is an enigma...and Jennifer is falling in love with him. Can she discover what drives this self-assured yet gentle man before a sinister stalker wreaks his revenge?

A hard term in Yuma Prison gave Ralph Tinsdale and his gunhawk sidekicks time to nurse a deep hatred for Smoke Jensen - the man who put them there. A bloody escape gives them the chance to get even. Their posse is already 40 strong, the price on Smoke's head is up to 20 grand, and with Jensen's own wife shanghaied into Tinsdale's deadly trap, this time there's more at stake than Smoke's own life....

With his rugged-cowboy good looks and the kind of smile that makes a lady's pulse race, Trey Calder could have his pick of women. But he's been holding out for someone special, and the minute he lays eyes on freelance photographer Sloan Davis, he knows he's found her. The attraction between the two is immediate and charged as heat lightning, even if they are as different as can be. But Trey's fierce passion may blind him to a terrible threat... Soon passion turns to suspicion.

It's summer in Galena, Nevada, and everyone is leaving town for good! After the harshest winter on record and the shutdown of the Shiloh Gold mine, Nathan and his friends watch as businesses board up and houses empty. Rumor has it that even their school may close. Who will be the next to move away?

Here is a time when the old west became new - the 1930s-50s - as Louis L'Amour witnessed it first-hand in Southern California before and after World War II. Many people think the age of gunmen, scheming land barons, murderous bad guys, and the determined men who stood up against them, went out with the end of the Old West around the 1890s. But, in L’Amour’s own time in the New West, there were far more bad men toting guns and making grabs for far more wealth and valuable land than in the fabled days of the Old West.