For twenty-four years, Five Star Publishing, an imprint of Gale/Cengage, has offered readers the best in new voices, as well as many beloved authors, in the traditional Western and American frontier fiction genres. Contention and Other Frontier Stories, edited by Hazel Rumney, features seventeen brand-new stories that will delight historical fiction fans. These stories capture the spirit of freedom and individualism in the evolving American frontier through the early 1900s and feature exciting new characters who face life-changing challenges in settings that are in stark contrast to civilized society. Ranging from high-action traditional Westerns to introspective historical dramas set in the American West, readers will discover the amount of courage and tenacity it took to survive the tumultuous frontier. In this anthology, you ll enjoy stories by New York Times bestselling and award-winning authors such as Loren D. Estleman, Johnny D. Boggs, Michael Zimmer, Max McCoy, John D. Nesbitt, Preston Lewis, Rod Miller, W. Michael Farmer, Greg Hunt, Bill Brooks, Tim Champlin, Robert D. McKee, Michael R. Ritt, Kathleen Morris, Vonn McKee, John Neely Davis, and Marcia Gaye. Contention and Other Frontier Stories is a great addition to your Western fiction library.

Multiple award-winner Loren D. Estleman has produced a major biographical novel on the infamous Mobster known as Scarface, rigorously researched and deftly nuanced to offer an intimate portrait of the gangster whose terrible crimes and larger-than-life persona have both fascinated and appalled the world for nearly a century; whose legacy is still widely debated; and whose brutally ambitious career in the Mafia continues to inspire filmmakers and writers to plumb its excesses and its contradictions.

In 1944, after Al Capone has been released from prison, J. Edgar Hoover assigns an FBI junior agent to insinuate himself into Capone's life and gain his trust so that Hoover can nail as many of Capone's Mob confederates as possible. Capone, suffering from the neurological effects of syphilis, is alternately lucid, full of the passion and energy that fueled his rise to the pinnacle of American crime...and rambling or ranting, the broken shell of a man released from prison so he could die at home with his family.

With the superb narrative gifts honed in dozens of novels, Estleman has captured the essence of this American icon as never before. With subtly nuanced portrayals of those in Capone's circle--his underrated wife Mae Capone, members of the Chicago Outfit including the deadly Frank Nitti--as well as his nemesis, J. Edgar Hoover, Hoover's secretary Helen Gandy and others, "The Confessions of Al Capone" is a major literary achievement.

In "Burning Midnight, "master of the hard-boiled detective novel Loren D. Estleman gives readers a hot new Amos Walker mystery.Amos Walker knows Detroit, from the highest to the lowest, and that includes the gangs of Mexicantown. When a friend asks Walker to get his son's brother-in-law out of one of two feuding gangs, Walker gets in trouble fast. First, dead bodies start to pile up; then come suspicious fires and the bottle bombs. Walker is caught in the middle of a gang war. Whether or not a middle-aged gringo like him can cool things off between the Maldados and the Zapatistas, he's got to try; he did promise his friend. Once he gets involved, he realizes there's something else going on; the specter of an international conspiracy threatens to make this local trouble blow sky-high. And if he ends up dead or in jail for murders he didn't commit, he might have to put that promise on hold. It's tough being Amos Walker.

In this first paperback edition of Loren Estleman's signature PI series, Amos Walker, the quintessential hard-boiled detective, proves that he's mortal after all. Jeff Starzek, an old friend who smuggles cigarettes for a living, saves Walker's life, getting him to the hospital after he's taken a bullet in the leg. A month later, still convalescing, Walker gets a panicked phone call from Starzek's sister. Jeff is missing. One of the few leads is a Homeland Security agent who's after Starzek, in connection with a counterfeiting operation that may have terrorist ties.
Though Walker doubts Starzek is a terrorist, he finds treasury paper at a church run by Starzek's brother. Then Starzek's brother disappears too. Back to square one, Walker follows his best hunch, driving Starzek's usual cigarette route along the Lake Huron shore, and finally gets a solid lead on the paper hangers. But before Walker can break the case, someone tries to shoot him--and he's accused of murder. Walker will need all of his intestinal fortitude, injured leg notwithstanding, to stay alive long enough to figure out who's doing what to whom, in time to save his friend.

The second wacky comedic murder romp for Hollywood film detective Valentino
Valentino wants to keep The Oracle, his beloved run-down movie palace, from being condemned before it even reopens, but murder keeps intruding into his otherwise quiet life. At a gala party held in memory of screen legend Greta Garbo, he's having fun until the host, a hotshot developer named Matthew Rankin, tells Valentino about a certain letter from Garbo to his late wife. She and Garbo had been...close.
Such a letter is of great interest to a film archivist like Valentino, but the the plot thickens when Rankin tells Val that his assistant, Akers, is using this letter to blackmail him. Val is appalled by the thought of blackmail...but that letter sounds juicier all the time. Returning to Rankin's mansion after the party, Val finds Rankin sitting at his desk with a pistol in his hand, looking at Akers's dead body on the floor.
Valentino's in a quandary. He'd love to see that letter, but he can't. He's gotten his girlfriend--who works for the police--in trouble, so his love life is, pardon the expression, shot to hell. Worse yet, the building inspector has kicked him out of his unfinished living space in the Oracle, so he takes his life in his hands and moves in with his eccentric mentor, the elderly, insomniac Professor Broadhead. No love, no sleep, no letter--life isn't fair

The undertaker's wife waits, she weaves, she builds.
The undertaker practices his art, the Dismal Trade, with consummate skill. He has raised it to an art through the high craft of the Connable Method. Through it, he has managed to transform the ugliness of death into a thing of dignity and beauty. Victims brutalized by war, street fights, tavern brawls, ambushes, fires, every hazard in a raw West--these in his hands become presentable. Everywhere on the frontier, which erupts with life and death, he offers his skill: to the rich of San Francisco, the bawds and ruffians of the Barbary Coast, to Kansas cowboys, outlaws, soldiers, and sheriffs. He is devoted to dignifying the dead.
She is devoted to making her marriage whole, in spite of the tragedy that surrounds it; and most especially in spite of the tragedy that in one terrible afternoon strikes at its center.
Today the undertaker is called to disguise the suicide of a famous financier. It is high drama, for only his art can save American's financial markets. Her task on this day is secret, an act of understanding and dedication.
In the end it is the undertaker's wife who, through love, is able to transcend death.

Enter Valentino, a mild-mannered UCLA film archivist. In the surreal world of Hollywood filmdom, truth is often stranger than celluloid fiction. When Valentino buys a decrepit movie palace and uncovers a skeleton in the secret Prohibition basement, he's not really surprised. But he's staggered by a second discovery: long-lost, priceless reels of film: Erich von Stroheim's infamous "Greed."
The LAPD wants to take the reels as evidence, jeopardizing the precious old film. If Valentino wants to save his find, he has only one choice: solve the murder within 72 hours with the help of his mentor, the noted film scholar Broadhead, and Fanta, a feisty if slightly flaky young law student.
Between a budding romance with a beautiful forensics investigator and visions of Von Stroheim's ghost, Valentino's madcap race to save the flick is as fast and frenetic as a classic screwball comedy. A quirky cast of characters, smart dialogue and a touch of romance make this Estleman's most engaging and accessible novel to date.

Calling upon his considerable novelistic skills, Loren D. Estleman exposes the black heart of a seemingly stable, well-run city suddenly pitched into violence and chaos. A delicate balance of forces—greed and  corruption, ambition and desire—run out of control in the wake of a serial killer's grisly rampage.
A power struggle—between a police chief who has looked the other way for too long, a Mafia boss who holds the city's vices in his powerful grasp, and media reporters looking for a big story—turns what has been a minor dispute into a desperate struggle for survival.
Setting this drama in a blue-collar metropolis dominated by an oil company, Estleman, with an unerring eye for telling detail and an ear for dialogue that reveals the secret desires of his characters, crafts a fascinating, deadly tapestry of love, ambition, revenge, and redemption, a stunning portrait of the human condition.

Accompanied by Dr. Watson, master sleuth Sherlock Holmes has already encountered the evil young hedonist Edward Hyde, and knew he was strangely connected with Henry Jekyll, the wealthy, respectable London doctor.

It was not until the Queen herself requested it, however, that Holmes was officially on the case of the savage murder of Sir Danvers Carew -- the blackest mystery of his career! Although Robert Louis Stevenson published his tale of Jekyll and Hyde as fiction, the hideous facts were true, insofar as Stevenson knew them.

Here, then, is the entire firsthand account of that devilish crime as recorded by Dr. Watson, with an explanation of why Holmes's personal involvement had to be kept secret -- until now....

Loren D. Estleman makes the Motor City sing—of loss and redemption, pathos and poetry. Now this classic series returns with a steamy tale of passion and crime...

A SMILE ON THE FACE OF A TIGER

"The blonde wore a red slip and held a broken bottle in her hand. The man wore a trenchcoat and a fedora, and through the window flames were burning in the night...." It was a scene of pure noir written fifty years ago by a master of pulp fiction, and Amos Walker would have felt right at home. Now the writer has disappeared and the Detroit p.i. has been hired to find him. Following the trail to an old unsolved murder case, Walker careens between a notorious New York hit man and a woman who made a living posing for the racy covers of pulp novels. Somewhere in a city of sadness and steel are the answers Walker seeks—guarded by the living and the dead, the real and the fictional, and a killer and his next target.