When I wrote The Shopkeeper, I wanted to write a different type of western. I love buddy stories. I also love fish-out-of-water stories. The Steve Dancy Tales combines both. More accurately, the first couple of novels maintain the fish-of-of-water storyline, but eventually, our shopkeeper gets the hang of the Wild West. Steve and his two friends, however, remain united throughout all seven books. They fight common foes, move through the western states, marry, have children, grow older, but remain fast friends. In fact, I consider Steve Dancy, Joseph McAllen, and Jeff Sharp friends of mine. I have sure spent a lot of time with them.
Westerns are often about a lone hero or antihero who rides into town and saves the day before riding off into the sunset. Lonesome Dove shows that a traditional western can be about relationships. Loads of variations are possible when the story is about characters tied together fighting off the bad guys. This is especially true for a multi-book saga. The West was wild, and security often depended on surrounding yourself with others you knew you could trust in a fight.
Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize winning novel is a powerful, triumphant portrayal of the American West as it really was. From Texas to Montana, it follows cowboys on a grueling cattle drive through the wilderness.
It begins in the office of The Hat Creek Cattle Company of the Rio Grande. It ends as a journey into the heart of every adventurer who ever lived . . .
More than a love story, more than an adventure, Lonesome Dove is an epic: a monumental novel which embraces the spirit of the last defiant wilderness of America.
Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch are a great pair of Old West lawmen. They not only have the skills to defeat bad guys, but their relationship also adds a new dimension to the traditional western. The engaging dialogue between the two lawmen connects with the reader. You want them to win, and you want them to stay friends.
When Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch arrive in Appaloosa, they find a town suffering at the hands of a renegade rancher who's already left the city marshal and one of his deputies dead. Cole and Hitch are used to cleaning up after scavengers, but this one raises the stakes by playing not with the rules-but with emotion.
The Sacketts series is a classic western saga and this first book tells the story of two brothers bound by more than blood. A good buddy yarn works best when the protagonists are very different. The reader must also want all of these different characters to succeed. Orrin and Tyrel are an unusual and unbreakable team.
In The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt pulls off the difficult task of making hired killers captivating. The sibling antiheroes go on a journey across the western landscape while contemplating their inner selves. In many ways weird, The Sisters Brothers ties a sometimes sad story together in a neat package. The book is a fascinating take on the traditional western.
Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. Across 1000 miles of Oregon desert his assassins, the notorious Eli and Charlies Sisters, ride - fighting, shooting, and drinking their way to Sacramento. But their prey isn't an easy mark, the road is long and bloody, and somewhere along the path Eli begins to question what he does for a living - and whom he does it for.
The Sisters Brothers pays homage to the classic Western, transforming it into an unforgettable ribald tour de force. Filled with a remarkable cast of losers, cheaters, and ne'er-do-wells from…
Winner of the 2024 New Mexico - Arizona Book Award.
In this deeply researched novel of America's most celebrated outlaw, Mark Warren sheds light on the human side of Billy the Kid and reveals the intimate stories of the lesser-known players in his legendary life of crime. Warren's fictional composer…
Buddies in the Old West are not a male-only club. Nor do they need to be age similar. True Grit proves both of these points. Rooster Cogburn is an aging U.S. Marshal hired by Mattie Ross, a fourteen-year-old girl. Mattie insists Rooster finds her father’s murderers. Two more different characters are hard to imagine, but the trail melds the two into a Yin and Yang dual that can accomplish the impossible.
There is no knowing what lies in a man's heart. On a trip to buy ponies, Frank Ross is killed by one of his own workers. Tom Chaney shoots him down in the street for a horse, $150 cash, and two Californian gold pieces. Ross's unusually mature and single-minded fourteen-year-old daughter Mattie travels to claim his body, and finds that the authorities are doing nothing to find Chaney. Then she hears of Rooster - a man, she's told, who has grit - and convinces him to join her in a quest into dark, dangerous Indian territory to hunt Chaney down…
In 1879, Steve Dancy sells his New York shop and ventures west to explore and write a journal about his adventures. Dancy's infatuation with another man's wife soon embroils him in a deadly feud with a Nevada silver baron. He cannot win the battle alone and two new friends show him how to survive the wild frontier. Pinkertons, hired assassins, and aggrieved bystanders escalate the feud until it pulls in all the moneyed interests and power brokers in Nevada.
Embark on a harrowing trek across the rugged American frontier in 1850. Your wagon awaits and the windswept wilderness calls. This epic western adventure will test the mettle of even the bravest souls.
Dorcas Moon wants to get her family safely to Oregon. Her daughter imagines ghosts at every twist…
The first female police detective in Acapulco, Emilia Cruz, dives into an ocean of secrets and lies when she is forced to lead the investigation into her own lieutenant's murder.
Caught between the powerful head of the police union and resentful colleagues, Emilia becomes a pawn in a game of…
