The Arkansas Regulators is a rousing tale of frontier adventure, first published in German in 1846, but virtually lost to English readers for well over a century. Written in the tradition of James Fenimore Cooper, but offering a much darker and more violent image of the American frontier, this was the first novel produced by Friedrich Gerstacker, who would go on to become one of Germany's most famous and prolific authors. A crucial piece of a nineteenth-century transatlantic literary tradition, this long-awaited translation and scholarly edition of the novel offers a startling revision of the frontier myth from a European perspective.

This novel plunges the reader into the last agonizing years of the Civil War. Cattle from the Florida plains are needed to save a desperate South from starvation. But quicksand and snake-filled swamps, Yankee raiders, and vicious outlaws block the trails between Florida and the rest of the Confederacy. Men like Tree Hooker, tough as alligator hide and quick with gun, knife, or whip, reckon with Union forces and renegades when they take on the job of driving the herds.

Ahen he died, Florida mob boss Frank DiCilia left his gorgeous widow, Karen, everything, but with strings attached. If she ever gets involved with another man, she loses the millions, the cars, and the palatial Gold Coast mansion. A crazy cowboy-wannabe thug named Roland, who's acting as Frank's eyes beyond the grave, is making sure Karen doesn't dally, with serious muscle if necessary. 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. And he's got the perfect plan for getting Karen DiCilia her money and her freedom . . . if it doesn't get them both killed first.

The Civil War was a time of brutal conflict in Missouri, leaving deep scars that festered for years afterwards. Some killed for revenge and survival in battle, others out of malevolence. This is a story about redemption for some and continuation for others. William Quantrill's lieutenant, Jonathan, a venerated combatant, becomes an assassin in St. Louis after the Civil War. After agreeing to kill a powerful politician, he knows that he must disappear, fearing that those who hired him will not want to leave any loose ends. Ten years later, Will and Betsy McGee, a young couple who have recently inherited a small ranch in southwestern Missouri, come into Cassville for supplies. There they are encounter Chunk and Virgil Jennings, both local ruffians. Chunk, the town bully, is embarrassed when he picks a street fight with Will. The Jennings retaliate in the most nefarious manner. Will is left to die and is rescued by John Turner, the wealthiest rancher in the territory. In the Box-T bunkhouse, his body recuperates, but not his mind. The story evolves to an eventual confrontation between decency and depravity, pulling Jonathan out of the shadows.

They laughed at Roberto Valdez and then ignored him. But when a dark-skinned man was holed up in a shack with a gun, they sent the part-time town constable to deal with the problem--and made sure he had no choice but to gun the fugitive down. Trouble was, Valdez killed an innocent man. And when he asked for justice--and some money for the dead man's woman--they beat Valdez and tied him to a cross. They were still laughing when Valdez came back. And then they began to die.

Following the War of Independence against the British Crown, a band of Tennessee settlers begins to carve out a new state in a young nation but face the opposition of the federal government and bloody resistance from the Chickamauga Indians. In this untamed land Owen Killefer, a slender lad barely in his teens, will face a trial by fire at the hands of white men and Indians alike -- and find within himself a stout spirit as strong as that of any frontiersman.

The third volume in The Tennessee Frontier Trilogy, The Canebrake Men is a saga of adventure set in the period from 1785 to 1800. In it Cameron Judd paints a portrait of the unforgettable men and women whose vision, passion, and pain gave rise to the new nation, such as:
-- Joshua Coulter, who had made a life amid the dangers of the rugged frontier and had been tamed by the Tennessee Wilderness, only to discover again a deep restlessness that stirred in his heart
-- Owen Killefer, who set out for the Chickamauga country as a boy to avenge a bloody crime
-- Emaline Killefer, who was torn from her family in a bloody raid by a British deserter and taken to live among the Chickamauga as his unwilling wife
-- John Sevier, the frontiersman who led raids against the Indians and was named governor of a would-be state the federal government never recognized
-- Andrew Jackson, a brash young lawyer with a fiery temper, who first met Joshua Colter as an opponent in a brawl but soon became a strong ally and loyal friend

"River of Tears" enters the heart of the two women in the life of an impassioned man who took part in the massacre at Bute Inlet.

At its heart, The Hi Lo Country is the story of the friendship between two men, their mutual love of a woman, and their allegiance to the harsh, dry, achingly beautiful New Mexico high-desert grassland. The story is told by Pete, a young ranch hand, whose best friend is Big Boy Matson. Together they drink, gamble, fight, work, and rodeo. They both fall hard for a married woman--the attractive, bored, and dangerous Mona. When it was first published in 1961, the novel was both a celebration and an elegy. It captured something jagged and authentic in the West, and it caught the attention of Hollywood--notably Sam Peckinpah, who spent twenty years trying to make a movie of this multilayered and plainspoken novel. It would take another twenty years for Martin Scorcese and Stephen Frears to finally do it. Now in a special 60th anniversary edition, The Hi Lo Country continues to tell a quintessential story of the people and the land found in the American West.

In this "comically subversive work of fiction" (Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books), Larry McMurtry chronicles the closing of the American frontier through the travails of two of its most immortal figures, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. Tracing their legendary friendship from the settlement of Long Grass, Texas, to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in Denver, and finally to Tombstone, Arizona, The Last Kind Words Saloon finds Wyatt and Doc living out the last days of a cowboy lifestyle that is already passing into history. In his stark and peerless prose McMurtry writes of the myths and men that live on even as the storied West that forged them disappears. Hailed by critics and embraced by readers, The Last Kind Words Saloon celebrates the genius of one of our most original American writers.

Corey Bowen is an innocent man. Wrongly convicted, and imprisoned in the brutal labor camp at Five Shadows run by a sadistic embezzler willing to kill to keep his scheme running, Bowen is determined to break out or die trying. The trackers have already caught him once, dragged him back through the mesquite and rocks, and beat him bloody and near dead after his last attempt. But this time he'll have help--from a lady with murder on her mind and a debt to pay back. They say that breaking out of Five Shadows is impossible--but Bowen is a different breed, and this time he will go to any extreme to escape.

Johnny Montana was tall and dark, and sport a thin, neatly trimmed mustache and he had midnight black eyes. He was particular about his person; he shaved regular and put rosewater in his hair and preferred clean shirts when he could get them...Johnny Montana was the kind of man who made things happen. "You planning on sticking around these parts for the rest of your days?" That question completely changed Katie Swensen's life....She knew in an instant that her answer would be 'no' if Johnny Montana was asking her to go away with him. They left in the late hours of a warm evening, her daddy snoring in the other room. Johnny Montana was the handsomest man she'd ever met. It wasn't until a few days later that she learned he was also a gambler, a road agent and a killer. Henry Dollar was a man that knew horses and knew how to ride them, and he knew guns and how to use them. He'd been tested by gunfire in the sixteen years he'd spent with the D Company of the Texas Rangers. Henry Dollar never shirked his duty, he never backed down, and he never took what wasn't his...but then, he just hadn't been tempted enough, yet. Eli Stagg was a hard, cruel, friendless man with a talent for hunting, tracking and killing. The family of William F. Gray, the late Senator of Arkansas, engaged Stagg to find and kill the man who shot the Senator and left him to die in the dust of the road... Pete Winter, a young lawman, was asked to escort two prisoners across Indian Territory to the court of 'Hanging Judge' Parker... In this rich and complex novel of the Great American Frontier, these characters cross paths and raise arms as they each seek their individual destinies and desires-some will emerge victorious while others will be defeated by harsh climes and hardened men.

This book is a cultural history of the interplay between the Western genre and American gun rights and legal paradigms. From muskets in the hands of landed gentry opposing tyrannical government to hidden pistols kept to ward off potential attackers, the historical development of entwined legal and cultural discourses has sanctified the use of gun violence by private citizens and specified the conditions under which such violence may be legally justified. Gunslinging justice explores how the Western genre has imagined new justifications for gun violence which American law seems ever-eager to adopt. -- .

In his National Book Award-winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher's Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America.
It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek "an original relation to nature," drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. "Butcher's Crossing "is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher's Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.

Owen Wister's powerful story of the silent stranger who rides into the uncivilized West and defeats the forces of evil embodies one of the most enduring themes in American mythology.

Set in the vast Wyoming territory, The Virginian (1902) captures both the grandeur and the loneliness of the frontier experience, brilliantly evoking the tension between the romantic freedom of the great, untamed landscape and mankind's deep-seated desire for community and social order. Wister brings to life the honesty and rough justice that ruled the range and the civilizing influence of determined women in frontier settlements that imposed a sense of society on an unruly population.

For Wister, the West tested a man's true worth. His hero-influenced by those of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper-is a man who lives by the classic code of chivalry, ruled by quiet courage and a deeply felt sense of honor.

Jennifer Vandermeer hated Kansas. With all her heart, she wished that she'd never left the dull security of Ohio, had never let her husband, Walter, take her from the order and civilization of the East. There was no preacher in Four Corners, Kansas, so Seth Baker, at the behest of his wife, improvised the words. Jennifer, her two young children, and a small group of strangers, listened as they clustered in a spot freshly scythed around the rectangular pit. Walter had not been long among us before he was taken away, but, uh, he was a good, uh, farmer and a good, uh, man... It just didn't make sense. Jennifer had told Walter over and over: "It's ludicrous, neither of us know the first thing about farming." But Walter had been adamant, and they came to Kansas. Now Walter was dead. And Jennifer was marooned in a sea of grass with a farm to take care of and two small children to raise. Where would she go? What would she do? It would be harder than she ever imagined. As she stood over her husband's fresh grave she couldn't know that her life would become a war every day. War against the elements, war against the will of the land, and most of all, a war, every minute of every day, against herself and her fears... For every glorious legend of the Old West there are a thousand workaday stories of the boundless persistence and courage that turned a wilderness into civilization. Jennifer Vandermeer and the story of her hardship, disasters and triumphs, is one of the real stories of how the West was won.

Featuring the character first written by Elmore Leonard, Raylan Givens After an altercation with his superiors in Harlan County, Kentucky, Deputy US Marshal, Raylan Givens is offered two choices. He can either retire or finish his career on the fugitive task force in the crime-ridden precincts of Detroit. Acting on a tip, Raylan and his new partner, deputy marshal Bobby Torres arrest Jose Rindo, a destructive and violent criminal. Rindo is also being pursued by the FBI who arrive shortly after he is in custody. Raylan bumps heads with a beautiful FBI agent named Nora Sanchez, who wants Rindo for the murder of a one of their own. When Rindo, escapes from the county jail and is arrested in Ohio, Raylan and FBI Special Agent Sanchez drive south to pick up the fugitive and bring him back to stand trial. Later, when Rindo escapes again, Raylan and Nora--still at odds--are reunited and follow the elusive fugitive's trail across Arizona to El Centro, California and into Mexico where they have no jurisdiction or authority. How are they going to bring Rindo, a Mexican citizen, across the border without anyone knowing? Raylan Goes to Detroit is an exciting continuation of one of Elmore Leonard's greatest heroes, an edge-of-your-seat, page-turner in the spirit of Elmore's classic Raylan books.

"Brett Riley's COMANCHE is the best western-horror-thriller-ghost story-PI novel ever written."-Tod Goldberg, author of Gangsterland Like a cylinder in a six-shooter, what goes around, comes around. In 1887 near the tiny Texas town of Comanche, a posse finally ends the murderous career of The Piney Woods Kid in a hail of bullets. Still in the grip of blood-lust, the vigilantes hack the Kid's corpse to bits in the dead house behind the train depot. The people of Comanche rejoice. Justice has been done. A long bloody chapter in the town's history is over. The year is now 2016. Comanche police are stymied by a double murder at the train depot. Witnesses swear the killer was dressed like an old-time gunslinger. Rumors fly that it's the ghost of The Piney Woods Kid, back to wreak revenge on the descendants of the vigilantes who killed him. Help arrives in the form of a team of investigators from New Orleans. Shunned by the local community and haunted by their own pasts, they're nonetheless determined to unravel the mystery. They follow the evidence and soon find themselves in the crosshairs of the killer.

Their cowboy days behind them though they d never get the cow smell out of their Levis and Pinkerton badges in their pockets, Bill Robuck, Happy Jack Dean, and Laughing Ed Leffler ride the owlhoot trails from Canada to Mexico, a collective scourge to desperadoes and rustlers. They live by the code "One for all and all for one" until they arrive in Flathead and a treacherous trail opens before them, proving to Robuck that even a partner can t be trusted. Robuck rides that trail to its last long mile, and transforms it to a trail of vengeance. His work done, embittered as only a man can be who s been sold out by his best friend, he s ready to move on, weary of gunsmoke and wanting only to forget. But the days of drifting and moving on are over, for in that valley of treachery and bushwhack death is girl who s the end of all trails for him."

When Angel Irosabel rides with his family into the fertile valleys of Paradise, Nevada, he knows that their grueling journey from Basque country is over he has found a place for his sheep to graze and for his family to thrive. Little did he know that his arrival would kick off an epic feud between the area cattle ranchers and his own herding clan. When his daughter Margarida falls in love with Joe Gault, the son of a cowman, Angel can t overcome years of hostility, and instead disowns his treacherous daughter. When tragedy strikes, forcing Joe on the run, leaving Margarida broken-hearted, the cycle of hatred and distrust is passed to the next generation. When the Gaults son Joseph falls in love with the daughter of another rancher, only time will tell whether family bonds can overcome the rancor that flows deep in the veins of the herders and cowmen."

New Western Romance Series from Bestselling Author Mary Connealy When Cimarron ranch patriarch Chance Boden is caught in an avalanche, the quick actions of hired hand Heath Kincaid save him. Badly injured, Chance demands that his will be read and its conditions be enforced immediately. Without anyone else to serve as a witness, Heath is pressed into reading the will. If Justin, Sadie, and Cole Boden don't live and work at home for the entire year, the ranch will go to their low-down cousin Mike. Then Heath discovers the avalanche was a murder attempt, and more danger might follow. Deeply involved with the family, Heath's desire to protect Sadie goes far beyond friendship. The danger keeps them close together, and their feelings grow until being apart is the last thing on their minds.