THE GREATEST WESTERN WRITERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY In this powerful new novel, William W. Johnstone and J.A. Johnstone chronicle Smoke Jensen's early years, long before he became a legend . . . Kirby—later Smoke—Jensen has just earned his first paying job as a deputy U.S. 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. It turns out Dawson is only a cog in a crooked plot hatched by someone hiding behind the law. For a young deputy marshal, going up against the powerful and corrupt is almost certainly a fool's mission, but doing nothing is not a choice. When Smoke strikes, he's in all the bloody way, and what follows will become the stuff of legend. Braving bullets, blood, and treachery to... Views: 34
A hot new Amos Walker mystery by a master of the hard-boiled detective novel. "Loren Estleman is my hero."—Harlan Coben, New York Times bestselling authorDetroit entrepreneur Carl Fannon hires Walker to trace Emil Haas, his partner, whose sudden disappearance has jeopardized their firm's plans to purchase the historic Sentinel Building. Almost immediately, the missing man shows up and asks the detective to meet him in the empty Sentinel to discuss a top-secret concern. Walker complies, only to find not Haas, but Fannon's suffocated corpse locked in a basement vault. When Gwendolyn Haas, the partner's adult daughter, enters the picture, the client number rises to three, including one missing and one murdered. But the worst is yet to come: Emil Haas's "concern" is that Fannon's been buying up depressed real estate on behalf of Charlotte Sing, the international fugitive Walker knows only too well as Madam Sing. Madam Sing is believed to have been... Views: 34
A missing boy forces Detroit PI Amos Walker to investigate a long-cold caseIt is hardly unusual for an elderly woman to ask Amos Walker to search for her grandchild. As a private detective in one of the country’s roughest cities, tracking missing persons is the way he makes most of his money. But Martha Evancek’s grandson Michael has been missing for nearly twenty years, having disappeared in the aftermath of a murder. When Michael’s father was laid off from the Chrysler plant, he quarreled with his wife and then reached for his shotgun, killing her, his daughter, and finally himself. An eleven-year-old Michael was left to find the bodies, and he vanished soon after. Now, for the old woman’s sake, Amos Walker takes up a cold scent. He expects to find nothing, but he’s in for an unpleasant surprise. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Loren D. Estleman including rare photos from the author’s personal collection. Views: 34
U. S. Deputy Page Murdock is ordered by Federal Judge Harlan A. Blackthorne to Cape Hell, Mexico, to verify a report that former Confederate Captain Oscar Childress is raising an army to take over Mexico City—and then intends to turn north to rekindle the Civil War. Childress, it seems, has the weapons, wealth, and moral compass to do it. Unable to talk himself out of the mission, Murdock heads south on a steam train named El Espanto—The Ghost. With only Hector Cansado, an engineer who can't be trusted and Joseph, a Native American fireman with a few secrets of his own, Murdock hurtles through the murderous desert of a foreign land toward a man bent on wholesale massacre . . . unless Murdock can stop him. Views: 34
Johnstone Country. Frontier Spirit Lives Here. Life is hard on the American frontier. Justice is even harder. But when it comes to revenge, no man can escape the righteous wrath of a wronged bounty hunter. Especially when his name is Flintlock . . . VENGEANCE IS COMING. Flintlock takes no pleasure in killing. But when his pal O'Hara gets bullwhipped by a trio of lowdown prairie rats, Flintlock finds sanctuary for his wounded friend at the cabin of a kindly miner and his lovely daughter. Flintlock heads out to hunt down some food. But there's more than just deer lurking in these woods. A bloodthirsty band of eight savage raiders—led by a half-mad gunslinger called The Old Man of the Mountain—wage a full-scale attack on the miner's cabin. By the time Flintlock returns, O'Hara's been beaten, the miner's been shot, and the daughter's been kidnapped . . . It gets worse. The Old Man plans to make the young beauty his... Views: 34
In this outing, Walker goes "Downriver," which is a Detroiter's term for any part of Michigan that does not include the city. Actually, he goes to the Upper Peninsula to give a released con a ride back to Detroit. When he and the con get run off the road and the con hires him to help find 200,000 dollars from a heist for which he was convicted but which he did not commit, Walker has his hands full.From Publishers WeeklyThe eighth Amos Walker novel (Motor City Blue) may not have an especially surprising chief villain, but Estleman is still in the top of the class of private-eye storytellers. Here Walker's client is Richard DeVries, fresh out of prison after a 20-year stretch for arson and armored-car robbery during the 1967 Detroit riots. DeVries, who's black, says he was framed for a murder committed during the robbery, and Walker believes him. DeVries also considers the $200,000 never found after the robbery as his due: "I paid for it, and now it's mine." He identifies a rising auto executive as the "revolutionary" who got him to throw the fire-bomb. Soon Walker finds himself involved with a hotshot, would-be car magnate, his "ex-model" wife and a centenarian auto pioneer. By the violent ending, Walker has uncovered a computer scam and some ugly, 20-year-old secrets. Estleman's colorful characters, crackling dialgoue, rich plot, authentic Detroit setting and throwaway humoras usualwork very well. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. Views: 34
As a detective on the mean streets of Detroit, Amos Walker has to make friends in low places. It’s part of the job. So when the incredibly successful madam Beryl Garnet needs somebody to fulfill her last dying wish, she turns to Walker. She hasn’t seen her son in a long, long time, and wants him to have her ashes when she’s gone just to let him know she hasn’t forgotten about him. Walker obliges her.Walker finds Garnet’s son, Delwayne, a Vietnam War protestor who has been living in Canada since the 1960s, and hands over his mother’s ashes. When Walker returns to Detroit, he is surprised to learn that Delwayne is dead and he, Walker, is the prime suspect.To clear his name, Walker must find the murderer. In the process he discovers another murder, of a prizefighter from the 1940s…Curtis Smallwood, Delwayne’s father. Walker knows he has his work cut out for him when he discovers that the two murders, fifty-three years apart, were committed with the very same gun. Views: 34
JOHNSTONE JUSTICE. MADE IN AMERICA. A Jensen family holiday takes a dark and dangerous turn—on the infamous Donner Pass—in this thrilling epic adventure from the bestselling Johnstones . . . It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas in the High Sierras. But Smoke Jensen and his children, Louis and Denise, won't let a little snow stop them from heading to Reno for the holidays. There are two ways for them to get there: the long way, going around the Sierra Nevada Mountains, or the short way, going right through them. Smoke decides to take a gamble. They'll follow the trail that, decades earlier, brought the legendary Donner Party to a gruesome, tragic end . . . And so the journey begins. The Jensens share a stagecoach with a stranger who's planning to rob a bank. Smoke wants to stop him, as well as his notorious gang of outlaws. But he's outgunned and outnumbered. And when a blizzard traps them in the mountains,... Views: 33
Blood in the SnowMountain men are skilled at survival. Preacher, the greatest of all those warriors of the forest, will kill anything—beast or man—that threaters his survival. Ten years ago, he taught this violent lesson to gun-crazed Ezra Pease when he ran the outlaw out of town. But Pease and his trail-scum gang are back—shooting up trouble and crossing the Big Empty to nail Preacher's hide to a tree.So Preacher's riding out to teach Pease one final lesson. But it could be too late because Pease's vicious dealings have fired up an all-out Indian war. Now, with hard-riding death on both sides, Preacher and some old friends called Beartooth, Dupre, and Nighthawk are heading straight into lead-flying, scalp-slashing hell... Views: 33
National bestselling authors William W. Johnstone and J.A. Johnstone know what it takes to fight for the red, white and blue. When the battleground is Texas, the outcome is sure to be explosive. . .Freedom Is Never FreeAfter the President closes Guantanamo Bay to hold civilian trials for the terrorists, some of them are relocated to Hell's Gate Prison in West Texas. Until a group of fanatical sleeper-cell shock troops launch an all-out assault to "liberate" their jailed comrades. There's just one problem: they don't know that Army Ranger Lucas Kincaid is working at Hell's Gate.With the town's high school team held hostage and in danger of being executed one by one, Kincaid assembles a ragtag band of survivors and aging hardcore cons into a lethal fighting force to keep the unholy warriors from their deadly mission. And Kincaid and his men are on their own—everyone, from the President on down, orders Kincaid to give in to the terrorists' demands.But... Views: 33
It was in the summer of 1958 that the horror surfaced in the town of Whitfield, erupting like a festering boil, spewing its corruption on everyone near it. Those who survived the terror remember it as the summer of The Digging - the time when the hot wind began to blow, when Satan's creatures rose from the putrid bowels of the earth, when the inhabitants of Whitfield were touched by... THE DEVIL'S KISS. Now it was summer again in Whitfield. The town was peaceful, quiet, and unprepared for the atrocities to come. Eternal life, everlasting youth, an orgy that would span time - that was what the Lord of Darkness was promising the coven members in return for their pledge of love. The few who had fought against his hideous powers before, believed it could never happen again. Then the hot wind began to blow - as black and as evil as THE DEVIL'S HEART Views: 33
LAND WAR!They were the titans of the plains, the men who carved an empire out of the vast expanses of the West. The cattle barons. They were tough, weathered men like Dusty King and Lew Gordon, who had sweated and worked along the great cattle trails to form a partnership whose brand was burned on herds beyond measure. They had fought hard for what they had...and they would fight even harder to keep it.And they knew a fight was coming. It was as thick in the wind as trail dust. Newcomers like Ben Thorpe were moving in, desperate to get their hands on the miles and miles of grazing land—land that King and Gordon wanted, and that Thorpe needed to survive. No one knew how the war would end, but one thing was certain—only one empire could survive. Views: 33
Wings of Death They'd flown north from Central and South America, appearing one day in the southern wetlands of the U.S. like ominous ink stains in the twilight sky. With each sunset, more appeared, first hundreds then thousands. Massing into a great black cloud of terror, the vampire bats were beating their wings in time with the panicked heartbeats in the towns below. No one knew how to stop them as they fell onto their prey like dark, deadly shadows. But someone had to find a way. Because somewhere in the night, they had become a threat to more than wild animals and livestock. Somewhere in the night madness took hold as these vampire bats developed a taste for human blood. And the feasting had only just begun. Views: 33
The locals were ecstatic when the carnival pulled into Holland, Nebraska. They shrieked in delight on the lightning-fast rides. They gasped in shocked fascination at the chilling collection of freaks and human oddities. But all the while, piercing red eyes glared out at the townies from the shadows of the midway. Eyes that burned with vengeful hatred. Eyes that lusted for blood . . . Only Mayor Margin Holland and his beautiful teenaged daughter Linda could feel the air of "wrongness" that hovered over the fairgrounds. Then the killings began--and their worst nightmares quickly came to life. Night after night a new victim was found, his insides smoldering, his face contorted in a gruesome death mask of hideous agony. Soon, for Martin, for Linda, for the entire plagued community, there was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Nebo's Carnival of Dread had come to town. And the horror show was just beginning! Views: 32
