Showing results by narrator "Michael Lewis" in All Categories

An interview recorded on an iPhone. A police interrogation tape. An FBI wire. At the center of them all is a writer researching a legal thriller...or is he? And somewhere within those recordings is the truth about a murder trial and a web of lies stretching back three decades.

Smoke Jensen was buying cattle a hundred miles away from his Colorado ranch when he got the news. He saddled up, rode off, and didn’t stop until he reached his wife’s side. She had been shot three times and lay close to death. Smoke knew the outlaws had come to kill him and he wasn’t going to give them a second chance. He was going after them.

Smoke Jensen has a good woman by his side. Now all he needs to make Sugarloaf the best cattle ranch in Colorado is John Chisum's prime steer. But a cattle war has turned the landscape into a battleground, and a ruthless gang of rustlers is hot on Smoke's trail. The bullet-proof mountain man is determined to get what he wants - even if he has to blast every one of the dirty desperadoes back to hell!

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 until a permanent replacement is sworn in. Turns out the bandits were members of Bishop’s Mauraders, a 20-man gang of trigger-happy thieves led by the vicious and venomous Snake Bishop.

Sera Donner has lost everything, perhaps even her own humanity. She's been denied her chance for vengeance against the praetor and her brother, and her own horrific crimes have chased her far from home. Descending into an abyss of isolation and doubt, she fears that Heaven has abandoned her. But Yahweh still has plans for the fledgling believer. Plans that will thrust her to the forefront of an ancient prophecy overlooked for more than two millennia.

On the eve of the Civil War, Kirby Jensen is the youngest of three children living on a hardscrabble ranch in Southwestern Missouri. But in 1861, shots were fired in Charleston harbor, and Kirby's father and brother went to war. Smoke Jensen: The Beginning follows the Jensen clan during these volatile years, from Civil War battles to border state raids to the kind of frontier justice achieved only by bullets and blood.

When preacher-gone-wrong Lazarus Cain sets his sights on pilfering a herd of cattle and a team of horses, his first mistake is crossing the Sugarloaf Ranch - and the owner, Smoke Jensen. Now, Cain will have to build an army of cut throats and brigands in order to stand a chance against Jensen and his gunfighter friends.

Preacher is on the move, joining a trail drive led by freewheeling adventurer Wiley Courtland. Wiley has good horses to deliver to the American Fur Company at Fort Gifford. An Indian war party, led by the cunning and ruthless Red Knife, has other plans. Furiously fighting their way to safety, the horse traders make it to Fort Gifford, where the beautiful wife of the fort’s commander makes a raid of her own, with the help of Preacher’s newfound buddy Wiley.

When gunfighter Monte Carson decides to go straight, returning a stolen $50,000 Army payroll, he makes an enemy of former colleague Jim Slaughter, who vows to kill Monte's wife in retaliation, and Monte's only hope of rescuing his wife is Mountain Man Smoke Jensen....

For years, like millions of other Americans, John Thomas Rourke had planned for what seemed inevitable — the destruction of civilization. There were various possible causes: global economic collapse, some uncontrollable pestilence, a world famine — or nuclear war.

It’s been barely a decade since the notorious gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Rustlers and outlaws still terrorize the land, and the good citizens of Tombstone are at the end of their ropes. Enter Texas John Slaughter — the new sheriff of Cochise County and the toughest lawman west of the Rio Grande. With a young pretty wife, a sprawling cattle ranch, and a backbone of steel to match the iron law of his badge, Texas John is determined to bring peace to this parched desert hell even if it kills him.

The long-awaited follow-up to the global best-seller Liar's Poker, The Big Short tells a story of spectacular, epic folly. It has taken the world's greatest financial meltdown to bring Michael Lewis back to the subject that made him famous. His international best seller Liar's Poker exposed the greed and carnage of the City and Wall Street in the 1980s; he wrote it as a cautionary tale, but people seem to have read it as a how-to guide. Now, he wants to settle accounts.

When iron clears leather, anything can happen. In Frank Morgan's case, a sudden duel with an assassin has left an innocent woman with a bullet in her back - and a friendship between Frank and a young Texas Ranger in tatters. Wanting to make up for his part in the tragedy, Frank rides to central Texas to help Ranger Tyler Beaumont put down the so-called Fence-Cutting War. But as big ranchers battle small ones, an outlaw gang has hellish plans of its own. 

Journalist and bestselling author Michael Lewis’ podcast Against the Rules is dedicated to examining what's happened to fairness. It feels like there's less of it every day, and one of the “haves” of those who are better off includes access to coaching. But does having a coach help or hinder us?

Twenty years ago, a toxic spill in the small southwest Texas town of Exile poisoned residents with permanent rage. The feds' response? Quarantine. Only residents who pass the feds' 4-S test can escape Exile's heavily fortified borders. Heidi Palermo, unwilling medic to her family of bloodthirsty street warriors, has taken the test repeatedly, trying to prove she's smart, strong, sterile, and sane. Three out of four ain't bad, but the feds don't grade on a curve.  

They busted out of prison, armed and ready to wreak havoc in the high country. Outrunning and outfighting the US Cavalry, more than 30 murderers and thieves would leave a trail of burned out ranches, robbed trains, and slaughtered innocents. Now, Smoke Jensen is going back to the place where his legend was born to wipe out a plague of low life vermin that have flooded the land he loves.

They came from the sea: a former ship captain named Owen Bird who inherited a Texas ranch from his brother.... A former pirate named “Black Terrance” Malone, who has arrived in the once peaceful Rattlesnake Valley with a crew of sea dogs to do his dirty work. And dirty work it would be, as Black Terrance begins a campaign of thieving and threatening, even targeting Bird’s beautiful young niece. Into this storm rides the Loner — Conrad Morgan, son of the legendary gunfighter Frank Morgan.

Snake Creek is a shabby little Texas town ruled by a mean-tempered outlaw who fancies himself a king — King Petty. He and his gang do what they want, when they want, and right now what Petty wants is the pretty wife of a farmer he just shot in cold blood. But Sam Two Wolves just can't stand by and watch as this King Petty drags the widow down the street and before long he and Matt find themselves in the fight of their lives. It's a fight they never meant to start, but they sure as hell are going to finish it.

In this raw, brutal world ruled by the strongest and the most vicious, an unseen player is manipulating Ryan and his band, luring him across an unseen battle line drawn in the dust outside Tucson, Arizona. Here, a local barony becomes the staging ground for a battle unlike any other, against a foe whose ties to pre-Dark society present a new and incalculable threat to a fragile world. Ryan Cawdor is the only man living who stands between this adversary's glory...and the prize he seeks.

Matt and Sam never could refuse a damsel in distress, so a whole coach load of lovelies, lead by the fetching Charity McKenzie, seems like a gift from heaven. But if it looks too good to be true, it usually is — and in short order the blood will start to flow. Matt and Sam rush in anyway and faster than you can say “soiled doves,” they’re up to their necks in trouble.