Showing results by author "William Johnstone" in All Categories

Kate Coldane has sweated blood for this saloon, and she won't let it go down without a fight. Silas Atwood may be the richest rancher in Hudspeth County, but that doesn't give him the right to push her around. When Atwood sends one of his goons to cause trouble at her watering hole, Kate's son, Rusty, guns him down. It may have been self-defense, but Atwood is the law, and that means Rusty has to run.

Kirby — later Smoke — Jensen has just earned his first paying job as a deputy US marshal for the Colorado Territory and is sent to the lawless town of Las Animas. There, he finds a sheriff too cowardly to face the outlaw leader Cole Dawson, whose six-gun has left a lot of good men dead. Young Smoke feels no such fear. He takes Dawson down fast. Then the real fight begins.

The gold-mining town of Red Light, Montana is the kind of backwater hole less famous for the folks that live there than the ones who die there - like Janey Jensen, Smoke Jensen's sister. Smoke never would have gone there if it hadn't been for her estate. But that isn't the only thing the Mountain Man's got to settle. There's also the score between him and Major Cosgrove. The man who owns Red Light - lock, stock and barrel - is six feet of trouble looking for somebody like Smoke to bring out the worst in him.

A visionary has a dream: to drive a railroad across the North American continent and through the vast Canadian Rockies. A thousand miles of rugged land stand in the way. So do hostile Indian tribes and outlaws who the see the railroad - and the men building it - as easy prey. But the project has a guardian angel of its own...Smoke Jensen. Smoke knows that this is one job he can’t do himself, so he heads to Canada with some hard-fighting mountain men from the Colorado Rockies at his side. By the time the railroad passes through Vancouver, Smoke needs every gun he can get.

The bear seems harmless—at first. Just a lost and confused grizzly poking around Big Rock. Then the killings begin. A horse wrangler is mangled. A rancher mauled. Then a bartender in the heart of town is found clawed to a bloody pulp. Now every man in Big Rock is taking up arms to hunt down the beast before it strikes again—which worries the local sheriff. He’s afraid this amateur hunting party could turn into a mass funeral real fast. So he asks Smoke Jensen to help keep everyone calm and contain the panic. Unfortunately, it’s too late. The panic is out of control. And the hunt is on.

South Texas, 1854. Regis Royle is determined to turn eighteen-thousand acres of raw prairie into the greatest cattle ranch in the world. But he can’t do it alone. The region is wilder than a herd of mustangs—and crawling with rustlers. Teaming up with the Cattlemen’s Justice Consortium, Regis hopes to stop the rustling and start laying tracks for a new railway. Problem is, the cattlemen—including Jarvis “Bone” McGraw, Regis’s own ranch manager—can’t help but lock horns with the Texas Rangers. And it doesn’t take long for this brewing pot of very bad blood to get a whole lot worse.

From Confederate marauder to rebel gunfighter to repentant preacherman, circuit rider Taylor Callahan’s road to perdition has been a hellish ride. Sinners beware. After riding with Missouri bushwhackers, Taylor Callahan vowed to never take another life. He’s making good on it in Peaceful Valley. By day, swamping a saloon. By night, preaching the Good Book. But this little settlement is about to become anything but peaceable. When the marshal takes a bullet in a sheepman-cattleman skirmish, he pins a badge on Taylor, leaving the circuit rider open to whole new world of hell.

Frank Morgan, a gunfighter known to many simply as “the Drifter”, finds himself adopted by man’s best friend and by a wide-eyed young fortune-seeker who seems to have more talent for finding trouble than gold. Two vicious outlaw gangs have kidnapped Frank's own son to lure him into a trap, providing the Last Gunfighter with his latest deadly challenge.

With a handful of murderous rogues, Captain Jed Foster has run off with four wagons containing new Springfield rifles, bayonets, and ammunition meant to resupply the troops at Fort Bowie in Arizona Territory. Foster plans to sell the weapons to the highest bidder, whether it's Apaches, Mexican revolutionaries, or Confederate veterans who still dream of destroying the Union. But that's the least of Foster's problems. His junior officer, Lieutenant Grat Holden, is coming after him...with the help of an ornery ex-sergeant known as "Hard Rock" Masterson and fiery guerrilla fighter Soledad.

Ever since he left Scotland to start a new life in America, Duff MacCallister has stayed true to the values and traditions of his clan in the Highlands. But as Christmas approaches, he yearns to reconnect with his family - even the ones he hasn't met yet. This year, two of his American cousins - twins Andrew and Rosanna - will be joining Duff for the holidays at the Sky Meadow Ranch. That is, if they manage to get there alive.

Smoke Jensen has journeyed up to the Colorado Rockies to a sell a prized bull to a local rancher. Instead, the rancher and his wife have been mercilessly slaughtered by outlaws only moments before Smoke's arrival. In a hail of bullets, Smoke pulverizes two of the murderers and drags two others to the town of Brown Spur for justice. Come hanging day, the two killers are on the way to the gallows when a thundering gang of raiders crashes into town and rescues them from the jaws of death.

It is the fall of 1867. Twenty-two years have passed since Tim Colter and his family were ambushed on the Oregon Trail, forcing the young boy to grow up, forge ahead, and find an unlikely ally in one-eyed mountain man Jed Reno. Now a widowed deputy, US marshal, and Civil War veteran, Colter is finally ready to remarry and settle down - until a dangerous new assignment becomes a life-or-death struggle for the soul of a town and the heart of its people....

The Lucky Lizard is bad luck. Not that the Nevada mine is empty; it’s full of silver. But the man who thinks he owns it fair and square is in for a very unpleasant surprise — a ruthless, hard driving Easterner named Dex Brighton shows up with a seemingly valid claim. Town marshal Frank Morgan has his suspicions and sends for some San Francisco legal eagles. They don’t make it to Buckskin alive....

Red Ryan should've known this job would be trouble. The first stop is a ghost town and the cargo is a coffin. But things start to look a little brighter when Red and his stage guard Buttons Muldoon deliver the corpse to a ranch run by the beautiful Luna Talbot. Luna asks the boys to help them find the Lucky Cuss Gold Mine, using a map tucked inside the dead man's pocket. Red has a feeling they're playing with fire. Especially when the map leads them straight into crossfire of a ferocious range war.

The Mountain Man series established William W. Johnstone as one of the most heralded writers ever to pen tales of the Old West. Following in the footsteps of his adoptive father Smoke, Matt Jensen has big boots to fill. Matt's never been one to shy away from a confrontation, and he's got a fire burning in his belly that's leading him straight toward a deadly showdown in the town of Braggadocio.

A Rocky Mountain winter has left Breck reeling from the carnage unleashed by bloodthirsty trapper Judd Carnahan - and readying a quest for vengeance as ruthless as their prey. It gets even deadlier when Carnahan lays siege to a trading post on the Yellowstone River. He's left the owner dead and kidnapped a pretty hostage who can turn a nice profit once he puts her to work.

Jonas Madigan is dying. He spent his life taming towns and upholding justice across the west with no regrets. Along the way, Madigan took the measure of good men like Smoke Jensen, who has traveled to Salt Lick, Texas to pay his respects to the lawman. But when bandits gun down the small town’s current marshal—and Smoke sends the killers to Boot Hill—Madigan asks his friend to wear the badge and keep the peace. Turns out the bandits were members of Bishop’s Mauraders, a gang of trigger-happy thieves led by the vicious Snake Bishop—and they’ve set their sights on Salt Lick.

The year is 1884. A 10-year-old British boy has come to visit his uncle’s Wyoming spread, just as the vicious Yellow Kerchief Gang has the ranch under siege. Outgunned and outmatched, a British rancher is willing to pay $5000 for help. That is more than enough money to bring Matt Jenson into the fray. A huge, bloody gunfight, fueled by betrayal, erupts at the Powder River. But Matt has to shoot carefully. The Yellow Kerchief Gang has a hostage — the British lad named Winnie.

There are a lot of ways a man can end up on a wanted poster. There's the easy way (murder), there's the hard way (robbery), and then there's Dooley Monahan's way (by accident). On the trail west with his trusty horse and dog, the hapless gunslinger stops a hungry bear from making lunch out of the legendary Buffalo Bill Cody. In turn, Cody grubstakes Dooley for the purchase of a silver mine in the lawless, violent boomtown of Leadville, Colorado. But when he guns down three deadly outlaws, the grateful townsfolk pin a sheriff's badge on Dooley. And that's when his luck runs out...

A beautiful woman, a powerful Mexican rancher, and an exotic new breed of cattle come to John Slaughter’s San Bernardino Valley ranch, along with the prospect of making a small fortune. While Slaughter’s men are out keeping the peace in Tombstone, an act of betrayal turns up the heat under his own roof, and a killer is stalking Slaughter’s wealthy Mexican guest. Indians suddenly savagely attack Slaughter’s ranch, but it is only the first shot in a bigger, blazing Arizona bloodbath.