Western Fiction

To start their new life together, Jamie Pratt and his young bride join a westward wagon train bound for the Rocky Mountains. They get as far as Helena when their unscrupulous wagon master deserts them, leaving them as good as dead in a godforsaken, blood-scorched land. The other settlers agree to set stakes where they are, but Jamie and his bride press on toward the Bitterroot Valley, deep into Sioux territory. They never come out the other side.

There will never be another Western writer like Louis L’Amour. A legendary author and indisputably the greatest storyteller in his genre of all time, L’Amour captivated millions of readers and has sold well over three hundred million copies of his works, which includes nearly ninety novels and countless short stories. Mistakes Can Kill You highlights an essential selection featuring nine of L’Amour’s earlier short stories, sometimes written under the pen name Jim Mayo, that exemplify the rugged morality of the best Western writing.

When Bruce Cowan takes his family and flees Boston to homestead out west, he figured the journey to California to be long but safe. Their first day out reveals how wrong he is and the perilous dangers of the Santa Fe Trail. It would have been a massacre but for Trent and Pat MacLeod. Trent favors a Sharps .50 caliber buffalo rifle, while his younger brother Pat packs two Texas Navy Colts. They both prove deadly and a force to be reckoned with. The Cowans and the McLeod brothers forge a bond those first few days, sustained in part by Trent's attraction to the 18-year-old Becky Cowan.

Rock Bannon, wounded in an Indian attack, is rescued by a wagon train heading to Oregon. He has fully recovered when the train pulls into a fort to stock up on supplies. It is there that the leaders of the train meet Morton Harper, a smooth-talking man who persuades them to take an easier trail that will allow them to escape an attack by Indians. Bannon knows that there will be no escape from attack on that route and that it will lead the train directly onto Hardy Bishop's vast ranching domain.

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 powderkeg of trouble - with a quick-burning fuse of vengeance named Alexander Duramont. This bloodthirsty psychopath wants to kill the sheriff for killing his buddies.

One man finds himself torn between two cultures in this sweeping tale of frontier life in post–Civil War era Texas. In the years following the American War Between the States, the once vacated military presence in west Texas is on the rise to protect the waves of settlers moving into the region. Living peaceably with the Mescalero Apache, half-breed former military scout Holton Lang promotes the tentative harmony between the US cavalry and the Native American population.

With Apaches on the prod, ex-cavalry sergeant Sean Keegan, bounty hunter Jed Breen, and ex-Texas Ranger Matt McCulloch take shelter in a West Texas way station - along with a hot-as-a-pistol female bound for the gallows, a spiteful newspaper editor, and a coward with $50,000 who promises them five grand if they'll deliver his blood-soaked stash to his wife. Turns out, Indians might be the least of the problems for the trio, soon to be known as the Jackals. The loot's stolen property of the vengeful Hawkin gang, and these prairie rats are merciless, stone-cold killers.

Jenna Wright grew up next door to Chestnut Ranch and the five Johnson brothers. Her older brother was best friends with Seth Johnson, and Jenna may or may not have had a crush on the handsome cowboy in her younger years. It was a long time ago, she tells herself. Now that she's divorced and back in town, she definitely has eyes for her best friend. Will he ever notice her?

In the first in this trio of Western stories by Louis L'Amour - "Black Rock" - Jim Gatlin, a Texas trail driver, arrives in the town of Tucker where he finds himself quickly drawn into the middle of an all-out battle for the XY Ranch when, due to a case of mistaken identity, he kills the segundo of Wing Cary's Flying C Ranch. Gatlin is a dead-ringer for Jim Walker, who, like Cary, wants control of the XY. Gatlin is thrown into a situation in which all he can do but fight for his life.

Louis L'Amour said that the West was no place for the frightened or the mean. It was a "big country needing big men and women to live in it." This volume presents nine of L'Amour's ever-popular short stories - history that lives forever.

A collection of stories capturing what it means to be a cowboy.

A collection of stories from the most famous Western author of all time! Desert Death-Song is a compilation of some of Louis L’Amour’s greatest stories, many of which might otherwise be difficult to find. Whether he was writing under his early pen name, Jim Mayo, or his own, L’Amour’s stories are unforgettable, touching on rough and rugged American ideals, and set in the untamable frontier of the Western United States.

Corbyn was fond of Cassie. But she was young, and he’d always thought of her as a little sister. Lately, something had changed. Corbyn was busy running the clinic and taking care of his daughter, Rose. Since her mother left town, he was Rose’s primary caregiver. Fortunately, the whole family chipped in to help. Among those who helped was Cassie. Rose loved her, and Corbyn found himself eating at the café where Cassie worked more often than not.

The second novel in Joseph M. Marshall III's acclaimed Lakota Western series begins in 1875, as Sitting Bull gathers thousands of Lakota to face the growing problem of white incursion. What follows is a sweeping tale of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, including the days and weeks leading up to the conflict and the remarkable defeat of General George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry.

Tessa May Everett had grown up loving four things in life; bull riding, her father and her best frenemies, Branch and Beau. But in less than eight seconds, she’d lost all four things and the single most important person in her life. Four years later, Tessa May is back and ready to reclaim her dreams. She was going to be the first woman to compete on the professional bull riding circuit, and nothing was going to stop her. Not the Boys Club that already held her to a different standard.

Daniel Sullivan needs a wife; the bank insists they will only finance his business if he gets married. What's he to do when the woman he's interested in is promised to another?

A young gunslinger is changed for the better by meeting a beautiful woman. A classic range-war Western, this novel features that powerful, romantic, strangely compelling vision of the American West for which L'Amour's fiction is known. In the author's words, "It was a land where nothing was small, nothing was simple. Everything, the lives of men and the stories they told, ran to extremes."

Deputy US Marshal Jeremiah Halstead is escorting notorious outlaw John Hudson across the territory for trial when he's ambushed by a pack of Hudson's men anxious to rescue their partner from his custody. Halstead puts the blast on them, but outnumbered and outgunned, he has little choice but to hole up in an old mining town known as Silver Cloud, Montana. It's a place where he can keep a lock on his prisoner while figuring out how to get past Hudson's gang alive. But the folks in Silver Cloud are none too happy playing host to the lawman or his kill-crazy prisoner.

The Scottish Highlands, 1885. Two men, brandishing knives, attack a young woman outside a pub. Duff MacAllister steps in and saves her - killing one of the assailants. Big mistake. The attacker was the sheriff's son, and now MacAllister is marked for death. His only hope: America. Here, in the sprawling land of dreams, Duff hopes to start a new life with his American cousins. Unfortunately, the sheriff's deputies are tracking him down - with nine of the deadliest cutthroats money can buy.

There are two sides to Captain Tom Skinner. One follows orders. One follows his gut. To keep the wild, untamed Arizona Territory safe, he’s going with his gut. Damnable news has reached Fort Verde. Outlaw Jessup Henry and his gang of thugs are raising hell north of Santa Fe, one homestead massacre after another. Now they’re on the run in Arizona Territory evading the law. Cavalryman Tom Skinner’s command: charge south with his patrol and wipe them out. But Skinner knows the land. Military decree be damned, he’s deserting the wayward route—against orders—for the right one