NEW
WEST 2
The amazing
popularity of current Westerns published under the William W. Johnstone byline
have kept the Western genre selling in the millions of copies. Published by
Pinnacle Books, who specialize in paperback original action series, the massive popularity of the Johnstone brand Westerns have made it possible for other Westerns to breakout, either from
Pinnacle or other publishers. Over the next few blog posts, I want to point out
some of these new Westerns from traditional publishers, and then move on to the
booming realm of independently published and small press Westerns. First up are
some Westerns from writers I know and whose work I admire...
WHERE THE BULLETS FLY
TERRENCE MCCAULEY
Surrounded by
ranches, farms, and precious metal mines, the town of Dover Station, Montana is
ripe for the plucking. It’s up to Sheriff Aaron Mackey to keep the peace—and
keep the dregs of humanity from trying to make a killing...Where the bullets
fly, vengeance reigns—If anyone can smell an investment opportunity, it’s
railroad men and big city bankers. They’re not the kind of folks that Sheriff
Mackey is used to dealing with. But greed is greed, and if anyone knows how
money can drive men to murder, it’s the sheriff of a boomtown like Dover
Station. But when Mackey is forced to gun down a pair of saloon rats, it brings
a powder keg of trouble—with a quick-burning fuse of vengeance named Alexander
Duramont. This bloodthirsty psychopath wants to kill the sheriff for killing
his buddies. And he plans to get his revenge using a highly combustible mix of
fire, fear, and dynamite. Mackey’s not sure how he’s going to stop this blood-crazed
lunatic, but it’s going to be one heck of an explosive and very violent
showdown.
STAGECOACH TO PURGATORY
PETER BRANDVOLD
These are the
violent days (and reckless nights) of Lou Prophet, as told to his ink-stained
confessor. Most of these recollections are brutal. Others are bloody. Some
might even be true.LAST STAGE TO HELL: What do you get when you take one stagecoach out of Denver, add a thousand-or-so bullets whizzing past your head, while sitting next to two headless corpses caught in the crossfire? If your name is Lou Prophet, you get revenge. Raucous, rowdy, ruthless revenge. Next question?
DEVIL BY THE TAIL: How do you catch a fork-tongued demon who’s busted out of prison to wreak all sorts of unholy hell on a small Texas town? If you’re Lou Prophet, you team up with red-hot Louisa Bonaventura, aka “The Vengeance Queen,” and cut a swath of merciless Prophet mayhem in return...Due process be damned.
BLOOD AT SUNDOWN
PETER BRANDVOLD
In Lou
Prophet’s lawless West, justice comes from the barrel of a gun—his gun. Peter
Brandvold’s acclaimed two-fisted Westerns tell of the bloody days (and
thrilling nights) of the bounty hunter called Prophet, and the dangerous woman
he dared to love. BLOOD AT SUNDOWN: Lou Prophet and the deadly Louisa Bonaventure have torn a bloody swath across Dakota territory in search of the Griff Hatchley gang. When they finally catch up to them, an epic blizzard threatens to turn the Dakota prairie into a frozen hell. To bag their prey before the storm hits, Prophet and Louisa split up—and take separate paths towards damnation.
DEATH IN THE SNOW: Prophet’s course takes him into a town packed to the gills with the deadliest outlaws that roamed the frontier, while Louisa gets caught in Sundown, a one-horse town where a hatchet-wielding maniac threatens to paint Main Street red. When spring’s thaw comes, they’ll find a city of corpses beneath the snow...And nobody gives a damn about the law.
ONCE MORE INTO THE FIRE
PETER BRANDVOLD
In the first,
full-length novel of this gritty, fast-moving western duo, Once More with a
Vengeance, Sheriff Ben Stillman finds himself in the unenviable position of
having to arrest a young man for murder on suspicious evidence. But the cards
are stacked against the young firebrand who calls himself Johnny Nevada. One,
Johnny has gotten Judge Hoagland’s daughter pregnant, shaming and enraging
Hoagland himself. Two, Johnny warned Dave Bliss he was going to kill him
because Bliss ordered Johnny to stay away from Bliss’s daughter, Sarah, whom
the young Casanova was also sparking. Johnny made the warning public and two
weeks later Bliss was dead. In the novella, Rattlesnake Convention, Ben finds
himself on the trail of two young thieving killers with a hard winter storm
bearing down.
SHOOT-OUT IN HELL
PETER BRANDVOLD
Bounty Hunter
Lou Prophet is stalking the notorious train robber Frank Beauregard, a man with
as much conscience as a rattlesnake with a baby rabbit in its craw. This snake,
however, has a woman in his craw—an innocent young woman who came west from
Minnesota to be the mail-order bride of a lonely rancher. Miss Mattie Anderson
finds her new home high in the Colorado Rockies far from what she’d expected.
She finds her husband-to-be far from what she’d expected, as well. Why is his
hired man so tongue-tied? Who’s the dead man in the shallow grave out back? As
more dead are piled high and the lead flies like snowflakes in a prairie
blizzard, Mattie begins to wonder if she hasn’t promised herself to the devil
himself. Only Lou Prophet can save her from the ties that not only bind but
threaten to hang her.
BEAR HASKELL
PETER BRANDVOLD
Two western
novels featuring Bear Haskell, U.S. Deputy Marshal, who rides for Chief Marshal
Henry Dade out of Denver’s First District Court. Haskell’s a former Union war
hero and Pinkerton agent, a big man over six and a half feet tall and as broad
as a barn door. He wears a necklace of bear claws taken from the grizzly that
almost had him for supper. That’s the kind of man bear is. He holds a grudge
and he gives no quarter—to grizzly bears or men. In these two rapid-fire
westerns, Bear is given the nasty assignment of going after the man or men who
backshot an old lawman friend; then, in the second book, of heading down to
Texas to hunt a notorious, mysterious, and cruelly cunning killer known as The
Jackal.
REVENGER
FRANK LESLIE
(AKA: PETER BRANDVOLD)
From the
celebrated author of the popular Yakima Henry novels, a new western adventure
series. After the War Between the States, the former Confederate Mike Sartain
came west and joined the frontier cavalry. Wounded by Apaches in Arizona, he
was nursed back to health by an old desert rat and his beautiful granddaughter,
Jewel. When the prospector and Jewel were viciously murdered by marauding
Yankees, Sartain hunted the soldiers down and killed them in his own fierce
Cajun style, for Jewel had been carrying Sartain’s unborn child. That’s how
Mike Sartain’s lust for revenge got started. That’s how he became a wanted man,
with a dead-or-alive price on his head. Now, with no choice but to keep on
riding, The Revenger rides for anyone who has an ax to grind.
SIX IN THE WHEEL
FRANK LESLIE
(AKA: PETER BRANDVOLD)
Saddle up and
ride the hot and wild trails of the old frontier with the Revenger, Mike
Sartain, as he rights wrongs for those in need. In The Bittersweet War, Sartain
rides into the Big Bend country of West Texas. He’s hard on the trail to Old
Mexico, for bounty hunters and lawmen are clogging up his back trail. Only, as
it often does, trouble finds him in the Davis Mountains, in the little town of
Bittersweet, which turns out to be appropriately named. In Gold Dust Woman, A
beautiful ranch woman from Lincoln County, New Mexico, wants Sartain to kill
her husband, a county sheriff under Pat Garrett. The woman thinks her husband,
possessed by an evil Apache spirit, murdered their three young sons. Is Everett
Chance really evil or is his wife loco?
APACHE SPRINGS
FRANK LESLIE
(AKA: PETER BRANDVOLD)
In this
western duo, the half-breed wanderer, Yakima Henry, pins a badge on his shirt...In
Bloody Arizona, four strangers ride
into Apache Springs and shoot the marshal while Yakima is locked up. Now the
marshal’s wife Julia convinces Yakima to wear her husband’s badge and take on
the kill-crazy, vengeance-hungry Rebel Wilkes, who wants to destroy the town as
well as his former lover, Julia. In Wildcat
of the Sierra Estrada, Apache Springs is flourishing after gold was
discovered in the surrounding mountains. With wealth comes trouble, and Yakima
is about to have his fill, not the least of which is a canyon filled with lost
Jesuit gold that fortune-hunters are willing to kill for, and the love triangle
he becomes involved in with Julia and her sister, Emma.
