Louis L'Amour is recognized the world over as one of the most prolific and popular American authors. While every one of his 89 novels is still in print, a lesser known fact is that L'Amour is also one of the all-time bestselling authors of short fiction. This volume features 35 action-packed frontier stories.

When Trace Riley finds the smoldering ruins of a small wagon train, he recognizes the hand behind the attack as the same group who left him as sole survivor years ago. Living off the wilderness since then, he'd finally carved out a home and started a herd--while serving as a self-appointed guardian of the trail, driving off dangerous men. He'd hoped those days were over, but the latest attack shows he was wrong. Deborah Harkness saved her younger sister and two toddlers during the attack, and now finds herself at the mercy of her rescuer. Trace offers the only shelter for miles around, and agrees to take them in until she can safely continue. His simple bachelor existence never anticipated kids and women in the picture and their arrival is unsettling--yet enticing. Working to survive the winter and finally bring justice to the trail, Trace and Deborah find themselves drawn together--yet every day approaches the moment she'll leave forever.

She reluctantly lets her trusted stable assistant join her in a journey across the wilds of Northern California in the hopes of catching Silas for one final showdown. Stansel follows the chase and shares the story of the brothers' rise from hardscrabble childhood to their reign as the region's preeminent horse trainers, tracking the tense sibling rivalry that ultimately leads to the elder's death. A fully realised tale that challenges notions of the modern West, The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo will satisfy fans of Kent Haruf, Charles Portis, Molly Gloss, and Smith Henderson, and establish Stansel as a new voice in this grand tradition.

Sketcher, as ramrod over the Valeron cattle, takes Reese Valeron's place on a trip to the yearly auction in Chicago with Shane and Jared Valeron. A simple sketch becomes the impetus that quickly involves Sketcher with several street urchins, a person called Mother and an unsolved murder. Meanwhile, Wyatt goes to visit a friend in the small town of Solitary. What starts out as a genial trip ends up as a battle with a rancher and his sons that leaves him fighting for his life. The call goes out to come to Wyatt's aid. Jared and Shane leave Sketcher to deal with buying and delivering the prize bulls to the Valeron ranch. Others from the Valeron ranch join the conflict, arriving in Solitary to wait for Jared. The battle with the Strang ranch could pit thirty men against Jared and his handful of men, while Sketcher is risking his life dealing with crooked cops and the leader of a Chicago gang. Covering bets on two fronts, the chances are slim everyone will get out alive!

Set in the lawless town of Deadwood, South Dakota, Hour Glass shares an intimate look at the woman behind the legend of Calamity Jane told through the eyes of twelve-year-old Jimmy Glass. After their pa falls deathly ill with smallpox, Jimmy and his sister, Hour, travel into Deadwood to seek help. While their pa is in quarantine, the two form unbreakable bonds with the surrogate family that emerges from the tragedy of loss. In a place where life is fragile and families are ripped apart by disease, death, and desperation, a surprising collection of Deadwood's inhabitants surround Jimmy, Hour, and Jane. There, in the most unexpected of places, they find a family protecting them from the uncertainty and chaos that surrounds them all.

Winner of the 2016 Laramie Awards for Western Fiction Longlisted for a Reading the West Book Award Finalist for the Colorado Book Award for Best Fiction Finalist for the High Plains Book Awards In Improbable Fortunes, Jeffrey Price takes us on a wild ride into Vanadium, a dusty, down-on-its-heels mining town in southwest Colorado where it would be fair to assume that nothing has ever happened. But you'd be wrong. As it turns out, quite a lot has happened, starting with a suspicious mudslide that destroys the town's Main Street and a cowboy, Buster McCaffrey, arrested for the death of one of the richest men in America, Marvin Mallomar. As the soon-to-retire Sheriff, Shep Dudival, investigates the circumstances surrounding the murder, it comes to light that Buster and Mallomar's young wife were having a Cowboy Always Rings Twice affair. From there, Price takes this familiar story plot and turns it on its head folding a rococo cast of Vanadium's characters into a timeline that begins with Vanadium's post-WWII labor strife and ends with the Kulturkampf of present day. While it may all seem humorous and surreal at first blush, one gets the feeling by Improbable Fortunes' unguessable conclusion that Price has used the fictitious town of Vanadium a place without a recognizable gas station, a decent restaurant, or a clean bathroom as the Rosetta Stone for something larger.

When Nathan Wheeler is taken from school by a drifter posing as a policeman, his girlfriend Amy Sterling, her mother, and a retired homicide detective spend the night searching the mountains for him and following his attacker.

The Lonely Men

Tell Sackett had been lured into the Apache's mountain stronghold by the icy beauty of his brother's wife.  He didn't go alone.  John J. Battles, Spanish Murphy and the half-breed Tampico rode beside him.  Each was driven by his past to test his speed and cunning against an enemy who could smell a white man a mile away-and then shoot his eyes out at a dead gallop.  It was a contest few men could enter-and fewer still could hope to win.



The Sacketts

They are the unforgettable pioneer family created by master storyteller Louis L'Amour to bring to vivid life the spirit and adventure of the American frontier.  The Sacketts, men and women who challenged the untamed wilderness with their dreams and their courage.  From generation to generation they pushed ever westward with a restless, wandering urge, a kinship with the free, wild places and a fierce independence.

The Sacketts always stood tall and, true to their strong family pride, they would unite to take on any and all challenges, no matter how overwhelming the odds.  Each Sackett novel is a complete, exciting history adventure, and read a s a group, Louis L'Amour's The Sacketts form an epic story of the building of our mighty nation, a saga cherished by millions of readers around the world for more than a quarter century.

The Sacketts were fierce fighting men from the hills of Tennessee.  The Talons were French, but a life of piracy brought them to America.  Milo was half Talon, half Sackett.  He'd been riding the outlaw trail for three years, but now he was hunting a man who had betrayed a trust with his own kin.  And when he found him, Milo Talon would do no less than any Sackett or Talon before him.

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. -- .