Once, Frank Morgan had a wife and a future on the land — until a rich man with a grudge drove him out of Colorado. Since then, Morgan's taken up the one skill that always came easy — gunfighting — and drifted to a mining town in the New Mexico Territory. But there's nothing easy about two vicious gangs descending on the town and threatening to wreak havoc. With his reputation preceding him, Morgan is elected to stand in the outlaws' way.

The Civil War tore at the very roots of our nation and destroyed most of a generation. In rural Arkansas, the Hancocks were devastated by that war. They not only lost everything, but experienced an unimaginable hell. How does a traumatized human being put themselves back together? Where does a person begin to heal his or her broken mind…and does one choose damnation or redemption? For the Hancock siblings: Doc, Sarah, Butler, and Billy, the American frontier becomes a metaphor for the wilderness within—raw, and capable of being shaped.

Genevieve Waters-Ewing is married. She's married to a man she doesn't love, and didn't agree to marry. The scoundrel dragged her to the altar, and now everything is going to change. In a split second decision, she runs away, and stows aboard a chuck wagon that's leaving on a cattle drive, heading north to Montana. She doesn't know where she'll go, or what she'll do, she only knows one thing - she has to leave Fort Worth, Texas.

Moon Medicine is the story of a boy genius with a peculiar sensitivity to lunar cycles. Jean-Guy lives in a school for boys in France until he murders his vile fencing teacher for raping a woman. He is smuggled aboard a Clipper ship bound for America—the place where he knows he will find the visions of his dreams.

He began his life as a slave. During the Civil War he escaped and lived among the Indians in the Oklahoma Territories. He learned to ride, shoot and track prey from his adopted people. When the war ended, he was recruited as one of the first black marshals in the history of the west.

When petty criminal Cal Carver is locked in a cell with a deranged, semi-naked cannibal, he suspects his life has hit its lowest point. He is mistaken. Abducted by aliens and whisked across the galaxy, Cal is thrown into a team of misfits and criminals and sent on a top secret mission for the president of Space. And that's when everything starts to go very, very wrong....

The weird, wild west - an American frontier populated by gunslingers, rattlesnakes, outlaws, zombies, aliens, time travelers, and steampunk! Twenty-three of science fiction and fantasy's hottest and most popular authors create all-new tales, written exclusively for this anthology. Aliens and monsters, magic and science are introduced to the old west, with explosive results.

To catch evil, it takes evil. Enter Devyl Bane—an ancient dark warlord returned to the human realm as one of the most notorious pirates in the New World. A man of many secrets, Bane makes a pact with Thorn—an immortal charged with securing the worst creations the ancient gods ever released into our world. Those powers have been imprisoned for eons behind enchanted gates . . . gates that are beginning to buckle. At Thorn’s behest, Bane takes command of a crew of Deadmen and, together, they are humanity’s last hope to restore the gates and return the damned to their hell realms.

When sworn protectors of Earth, the Justice Platoon, are all horribly killed, their former arch-enemies come crawling out of the woodwork. Outnumbered, outgunned, and out of options, the US government has no choice but to activate the Sidekicks Initiative, dragging the Platoon's middle-aged ex-sidekicks out of retirement. Now these three reluctant, out of shape former child-wonders must work together to stop the rising tide of supervillainy, avenge their former mentors' deaths, and bring the world back from the brink of destruction.

Seeking to fulfill the promise she made to her dying father, 18-year-old Jesselynn Highwood determines to take her little brother and the family's remaining thoroughbreds from the Twin Oaks plantation in Kentucky to her uncle's farm in Missouri, where they will be safe for the remainder of the Civil War.

There was trouble in Haven, Arizona, and Ranger Sam O'Ballivan was determined to sort it all out. He arrived posing as the new schoolteacher, and his first order of business was to bring the rough ranchers' children under control. To that end, he called on Maddie Chancelor, the local postmistress, whose younger brother was in firm need of discipline. Sam wasn't sure what to expect - but it was definitely not this graceful woman whose prim, proper stance was so at odds with the fire in her eyes.

Lee Westfall has a strong, loving family. She has a home she loves and a loyal steed. She has a best friend - who might want to be something more. She also has a secret.

Mauled by a giant grizzly and left to die, 16 year-old Jose Olano's chances for life were remote. Then, like a guardian angel, came Robert "Gray Eagle" McAllister, one-time army scout and sometime outlaw. In his flight to escape a posse, he finds the brutalized body of Jose. Knowing his decision to help Jose may mean his own death, he stays and brings Jose back from the brink of death. Thus began one of the greatest companionships ever known to the Idaho frontier.

It’s 1852. The wounds of the Mexican War are healing. Regis Royle, co-owner of a steamship fleet, has made it out alive, relatively unscarred and with enough profit and foolhardy ambition to envision a new life in south Texas. With the help of his crack-shot kid brother Shepley, his glad-handing riverboat partner Cormac Delany, and his old friend, raw-edged former Texas Ranger Jarvis “Bone” McGraw, Regis is laying claim to the prime jewel in a magnificent rolling prairie: the Santa Calina range teeming with wild mustangs, cattle, and eighteen-thousand acres of lush promise.

Six guns, whips, and wild, wild women! 1876: Time to throw away the corsets and draw down on the Old West. When Horace Greeley said "Go West Young Man" he never would have thought that two young women would take his advice to heart. Striking out against all odds and risking everything to be together. Society calls them Sapphists. Chief Sitting Bull calls them "Big Magic". Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok call them friends. Pinkerton's detectives want them alive.

Lee Westfall has a strong, loving family. She has a home she loves and a loyal steed. She has a best friend - who might want to be something more. She also has a secret.

Mauled by a giant grizzly and left to die, 16 year-old Jose Olano's chances for life were remote. Then, like a guardian angel, came Robert "Gray Eagle" McAllister, one-time army scout and sometime outlaw. In his flight to escape a posse, he finds the brutalized body of Jose. Knowing his decision to help Jose may mean his own death, he stays and brings Jose back from the brink of death. Thus began one of the greatest companionships ever known to the Idaho frontier.

One ranch. Three sons. Only one will inherit...and on one condition. Tired of waiting for his sons to settle down, Arizona-territory rancher Angus McKettrick announces a competition: the first son to marry and produce a grandchild will inherit Triple M ranch. Now, three distinctly different, equally determined cowboys are searching high and low for brides.

The literary legacy of USA Today best-selling author and Medicine Pipe Bearer Award nominee Ralph Compton lives on in Ride the Hard Trail. Hiding from the law, brothers Lin and Chancy Bryce hire on as cowpunchers at a widow’s ranch. But soon they’re embroiled in a range war with a nefarious cattle baron who has a small army of hired guns protecting his interests.

He was a loner, a drifter, a fast gun whose aura of dangerous virility turned pretty heads all across the West. But if his reputation as an outlaw didn’t warn decent women away, his Comanche blood did. He saved Jessica’s life out on the desolate plains, then made her a willing captive of his savage desire. But even when he had left her behind to rejoin his people, Jesse found she could not forget him.

From humble beginnings in rural Tennessee to his heroic death defending the Alamo, frontiersman, adventurer, and politician David Davy Crockett embodies the spirit and ideals of the national character. Even during his lifetime, tales of the sharpshooting, skilled woodsman were - to his delight - told, retold, and elaborated on. As a US congressman, the former Creek War militiaman steadfastly opposed President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act.

Busted out of prison by an outlaw friend, Flintlock joins a hunt for a fortune - a golden bell hanging in a remote monastery. But between the smouldering ruin of his former jail cell and a treasure in the Arizona mountains there will be blood at a U.S. Army fort, a horrifying brush with Apache warriors, and a dozen bloody showdowns with the schemers, shootists, madmen, and lost women who find their way to Flintlock's side.

When Bridget McQuarry comes to settle in Primrose Creek, she has nothing to lose; her husband, Mitch, was killed in the Civil War, and she has lost her family farm to ruinous Reconstruction taxes. With her baby son and a sister to care for, Bridget vows to make a new start out West. But when Mitch's best friend reappears in her life, he sparks a forbidden passion she thought was forever buried.

Can a rough Texas Ranger overcome a woman’s hardened heart? Amanda Ross returns from her Boston finishing school to claim the Texas ranch her parents died fighting to protect. Determined to protect the sprawling ranch that has been in her family for generations, Amanda hates the Comanche people for taking away her only family. Clay McAlester may be a Texas Ranger, but he identifies most strongly with the Comanche people that raised him.

Creede of Old Montana follows the exploits and heartbreaks of Avery John Creede, an ex-cavalry soldier, as he tramps along the upper Missouri River in search of four army pals who didn't show up for a scheduled reunion. Throughout Creede's confrontations and adventures, three things remain constant: his courage, his rock-solid faith, and his wounded heart. He knows the first two will never change. And at 42, he's not sure the third ever will either.

Parker Stanley's family had a dream: to start a new life in the Far West. But en route, a Cheyenne band slaughters his parents and abducts his sister. Then cowboy Clay Springer rides to the rescue - and comes up with an idea. He's got a team ready to deliver goods to the Mormons in Utah, but he's short on funds for supplies. He knows that Parker managed to hold on to his family's savings, so he suggests a 50-50 partnership. With a three-wagon, seven-man team, Parker and Clay will traverse the barren land, but out in the wilderness, Parker's sister needs saving - and he has vowed to find her.

Robert Jackson Bennett makes a stunning debut with this deliciously dark tale sure to hold readers in its menacing thrall. The grinding poverty brought on by the Great Depression is nowhere more apparent than in the untold thousands looking for work along America’s railroad system. But one man haunting the rail camps has been moved by an entirely different brand of desperation: revenge.

In 1876 the seemingly impossible happened in San Antonio, Texas - Emmett Strong, a prodigy of a pistolero, accidentally shot his own young wife in a showdown gone awry. Five years later, death again visits Emmett's family, and now - want to or not - he's going to have to overcome his reluctance to draw his six-gun if he's to catch and bring to justice the crazed gunman who murdered his brother.

When Kate Thompson's father is killed by the notorious Rose Riders for a mysterious journal that reveals the secret location of a gold mine, the 18-year-old disguises herself as a boy and takes to the gritty plains looking for answers and justice. What she finds are devious strangers, dust storms, and a pair of brothers who refuse to quit riding in her shadow. But as Kate gets closer to the secrets about her family, she gets closer to the truth about herself and must decide if there's room for love in a heart so full of hate.

In 1897, an aspiring politician is mysteriously murdered in the rural area of Alabama known as Mitcham Beat. His outraged friends - mostly poor cotton farmers - form a secret society, Hell-at-the-Breech, to punish the townspeople they believe responsible. The hooded members wage a bloody year-long campaign of terror that culminates in a massacre where the innocent suffer alongside the guilty.