Showing results by publisher "Crossroad Press" in Westerns

Josey Wales was the most wanted man in Texas. His wife and child had been lost to pre-civil War destruction and, like Jesse James and other young farmers, he joined the guerrilla soldiers of Missouri-men with no cause but survival and no purpose but revenge.

Josey Wales and his Cherokee friend, Lone Watie, set out for the West through the dangerous Camanchero territory. Hiding by day, traveling by night, they are joined by an Indian woman named Little Moonlight, and rescue an old woman and her granddaughter from their besieged wagon. The five of them travel toward Texas and win through brash and honest violence, a chance for a new way of life.

It's the Arizona Territory. The year, 1848. The year the Mexican War ended. Fate and blazing pistols have just thrown together reporter and part-time drunk Marion T. Bell and the very nearly legendary John Charles Hart, mustanger and scout, in the Little Fanny Saloon. Plying the river-trade across the Colorado to the gold fields of California in the north, and war-torn Mexico to the south, the town of Gable's Ferry has sprung up overnight-lacking only a church, a schoolhouse and a jail.

Someone in Blacklin County, Texas, is being disrespectful of the dead, and Sheriff Dan Rhodes must put a stop to it. First, there's the matter of the bodies at Ballinger's Funeral Home and the apparent misplacing of their valuables; the bereaved are beside themselves. There'd best be immediate action, or the bell could toll again - this time, for Sheriff Dan's reputation as the guardian of justice and decency in these parts.

Following the brutal murder of former Confederate officer Joshua Wingade, the pursuit for the renegade vampire Jules Holland and his hellish followers continues across a war-torn South. The newly resurrected gunfighter Dead-Eye, accompanied by Louisiana mojo man Job, find themselves hot on the trail, eager to rescue an abducted child and put an end to the death and destruction the outlaws and the dark witch Evangeline have conjured with the aid of Necronomicon and the otherworldly Hole Out of Nowhere.

Sheriff Dan Rhodes knows it's going to be a bad day when Bert Ramsey arrives at the jail with a neatly wrapped arm and lays it on Dan's desk. He has another out in the truck, he tells the sheriff, and "a couple of legs, too, but they don't match up". Then Bert Ramsey is shot to death, and serious crime takes over. A tattoo on the body discloses that Ramsey was once a member of Los Muertos, a violent motorcycle gang from the city, and current members of the gang turn up in Blacklin County.

When the Magic Wagon comes to town, folks get a genuine medicine show that includes a wrestling ape, fancy shooting, and a peek at the petrified body of Wild Bill Hickok himself. They also get bottles of a whiskey-laced elixir to drown their aches and pains. Old Albert drives the wagon, a raw-boned youngster named Buster Fogg does the odd jobs, and "champion" trick shooter and fast talker Billy Bob Daniels owns the show. Billy Bob claims to be the illegitimate son of Wild Bill himself.

I'm sure you've heard of Calamity Jane, but this is not a novel about Calamity Jane. At least not the Jane you may have heard about. Calamity Jane is part of the legends of the Wild West, but long before she scouted with Custer or "Wild Bill" Hickok, she was a 15-year-old girl with a fiery temper. Violence and tragedy turn young Jane's world upside down and soon she finds herself riding with an alien gunslinger — the Green Man — through a landscape of revenge and betrayal.

After his family is killed by a pack of rabid wolves, Jefferson Gray survives the horrid disease himself, with the aid of a Cherokee medicine man. But, unfortunately, he can not banish the hatred that dwells within him: an animosity toward dangerous game, particularly timber wolves. Fifteen years have passed. Timber Gray is known throughout the western territories as a seasoned tracker and hunter. But can Timber tackle his greatest challenge - a pack of 50 wolves led by the legendary Cripplefoot?

Some things are older than time. Older than darkness. Every line is not a straight line and everything must converge. A parable writ in dust and blood on warped barn wood. A journey in the classic sense, populated with dried husks of towns...and people both odd and anything but ordinary. Hornets, reverse-werewolves and one of the most vicious villains you’ll ever know are all part of it. Pull on your boots and saddle up, we’ll Walk The Darkness Down.

Priest McClaren wants to put his past behind him. It's a past filled with loss, murder... and revenge. Now all Priest wants is to own a carpentry shop and earn a quiet living building coffins. But it looks like peace and quiet just aren't in Priest's future. His ex-lover has pleaded with him to carry ransom money into hostile territory in Mexico, to rescue her new husband.

Skinwalkers tells the story of Perdition, New Mexico, and of the harrowing night its residents are attacked by a pack of rabid coyote-men (skinwalkers). It is a night of extreme horror in which the townspeople must answer for the sins of their past. Many succumb, both to the skinwalkers and to the guilt over their transgressions, while others rise above the desperate circumstances facing them.

Before Jesse James or Billy the Kid, there was Joaquín Murrieta - lover, bandit, revolutionary. On July 25, 1853, a troop of California Rangers killed and beheaded the young bandit. It was believed his army numbered in the hundreds and that he planned to sweep the country south to Sonora. Thinking the matter ended, the Rangers preserved his head in a bucket of whiskey and rode to Sacramento to collect their reward. Yet with his death, his fame only grew, along with rumors of his ghost in haunt of the Rangers.

No man is Boon’s equal, no gun more lethal. Boonsri Angchuan travels the trails, riding from town to town with her one and only friend, a portly Arkansan drunkard named Edward Splettstoesser. She has done nothing else for years, her only goal being revenge upon the one man who should have protected her but instead sold her and her mother into bondage. Boon and Edward navigate corrupt lawmen, hostile Kiowa, a mad judge, and countless gunmen aiming for their heads in Boon’s dogged pursuit of answers - and vengeance.

In tiny Blacklin County, Texas, a curse is nothing more than a four-letter word hollered in a barroom or muttered in the heat. So Sheriff Dan Rhodes is more curious than concerned when he dutifully responds to a complaint of witchcraft. When Dr. Samuel Martin, the local dentist - and unpopular landlord - claims he's been hexed by a tenant, Rhodes does his best to smooth things out between the distressed D.D.S. and the would-be witch. But in two shakes of a black cat's tail, the good doctor disappears...and his wife turns up bludgeoned to death.

Retirement does not agree with former lieutenant Thomas Mullin. So when he receives a whiskey-stained letter detailing the disappearance of his friend's daughter Abby, he jumps on the first train to Arizona. Folks around town think Abby has gone back to the reservation where she was raised, yet the more Mullin investigates, the more suspicious he becomes. But even his agile mind and gift for deduction can't prepare him for the wild legends of the Papagos or the terrifying truth of what's really in store for Abby.

Riding the crest of the bloody tide is Jim Caspion, a Civil War veteran turned buffalo hunter, a man of notable conscience and courage, ever haunted by the war, yet fleeing settlement and routine, forswearing the practicable for the exotic, the forbidden, and the extreme. From the opening when he rides into a buffalo stampede to escape a band of Cheyenne, to the very end, his fate is inexorably tied to the white buffalo he spies in his harrowing flight. Thereafter, its spiritual aspect exerts a growing influence over his own wry, sensual nature, altering his outlook.

When a man known only as The Deacon set up camp outside Rookwood, a murder of crows took to unnatural, moonlit flight. The crows came to Rookwood; trouble soon to follow. Things were already strange in that God-forsaken town, but no one could have predicted the forces and fates about to meet in a dust-bowl clearing in the desert. A Preacher. A Demon. An Angel. A Gunslinger.

After being reformed for five years in the Wyoming pen, the celebrated criminal Mugs Birdsong decides to found a crime academy that will instruct lawmen on the ways of means of lawlessness. He sets up shop in an abandoned orphanage in Rock Springs, and soon is instructing classes in bank robbery, train robbery, and various other sterling occupations. He sells autographed wanted posters, and persuades a banker to let him stage a mock robbery at the bank, for the benefit of his students - and that's when the fun begins.

Lizzie Randall, the preacher's daughter, is murdered. The men of the west Texas town are set on lynching Paco Morales, a Mexican teenager who happened to be in the vicinity at the time. No proof, but, after all, he is only a Mexican. Reason and/or conscience work on most of the would-be lynchers, so that, in the end justice is served. The list of suspects grows to include almost everyone in the story, thus providing an agreeable tangle of clues.