Showing results by narrator "Eric+Dove" in All Categories

After three years in exile in Mexico, the Rio Kid slipped back into the United States, evading the clutches of a Texas Ranger, a crooked rancher, and a gang of desperadoes. Now he's ready to press on to Arizona to clear his name and find his fortune. There may be a $10,000 price on his head, but the Kid is unafraid - he has his gun, his horse, and his freedom. When a scream splits the black Texas night, the outlaw rides toward it. In a godforsaken cave, four men are beating a terrified young boy. The Kid draws two .45s and steps into the line of fire.

At first, Twister Malone and Chuckaluck Thompson think it must be a mirage. If real, the willow trees they see on the horizon mean that water is nearby, and in this dusty stretch of the Southwest, water is rarer than gold. They rub the grit from their eyes, yet the sight remains. There really is water up ahead - and death just around the corner. Someone has opened a sluicegate, allowing all the precious liquid to drain into the dirt. When Twister and Chuckaluck close the gate and the roaring stops, a woman screams, "Don't let him get away! He was going to kill me!"

Colorado, July 1878. The nationally famous solar eclipse is almost upon the country, and a peak overlooking the fledgling town of Elkhorn is one of the centers of attention. In the midst of boisterous and chaotic frontier pre-celebrations, Caleb Marlowe - reluctantly deputized for the coming event - learns that local power broker Judge Horace Patterson is being targeted for assassination by agents of a financial magnate. Caleb's efforts to thwart the plan, however, are complicated when a ghost from his past shows up with the intention of blackmailing him.

Courting Death finds Melanie Wilkerson (from Cotton, book two of the Clarkeston Chronicles) and Arthur Hughes working uncomfortably together in the chambers of a famous federal judge. While Melanie neglects her duties as a law clerk to investigate the mysterious death of a young woman in the courthouse five years earlier, Arthur wades through the horrific habeas corpus appeals of two prisoners: an infamous serial killer and a pathetic child murderer.

For years, Caleb Marlowe has been following a hard trail. But fate finally seems to be smiling on him. The ranch he and his partner have been building is ready for a herd of longhorns, and a ghost from his troubled past is about to dance at the end of a hangman's rope. With winter descending on the Colorado boomtown of Elkhorn, Caleb's future looks bright. But in the wild West, a man's fortune can turn with the speed of a mountain storm. When his partner is jailed for murder, his herd taken by rustlers, and his ranch nearly destroyed, Marlowe knows someone is trying to run him off.

It was dusk when Todd Duncan sighted the man and his camp at a small oasis on the edge of the desert. Duncan, on his way to New Mexico to find work, knew better than to barge into a stranger's camp. After riding in and dismounting, he decided to make coffee before waking the stranger. When he called to the man, there was no response, so he walked over to find the man dead from a gunshot wound. It is then that he finds himself surrounded by Sheriff Matt Berryhill and his posse, their guns drawn.

Wilson is willing to pay Cole $5,000 to help get back his wife, Lenora, who has been taken hostage by Lucky Jack Dancer, an outlaw who had robbed the train on which she was a passenger. She is being held prisoner in Gun Town, a safe haven for outlaws. Cole had sided with Lucky Jack Dancer years ago when both of them had operated as US marshals in the Indian Nations, but that was before Lucky Jack had quit the service and become an outlaw.

John Henry Cole worked for years in Cheyenne, Wyoming - first as a policeman and later a detective. He enjoyed the work, despite its dangers, but it was time for a change. So he decided to open his own agency, one staffed by former lawmen like himself. In practice they might be bounty hunters, but he hired men he had worked with before, that he knew and trusted to be honorable and professional - and then they got to work.

Forty years after her son's tragic death, Betty tells the story to a fellow traveler in Ireland. Interspersed with her version of events, we hear her son, Stephen, telling us his own story of longing and loss and about the lunge at life that became his undoing.

Duke Snider is an ex-Navy SEAL who has compiled a collection of 10 men and five women; each possess specialized skillsets that enable them to travel the world to engage and eviscerate evil individuals and terrorists. A secret source within the US government has retained the services of Duke's crew, the Syndicate, to track down the origin of the coronavirus, but as their mission unfolds, they find that the coronavirus isn't the greatest threat to world - coronacyde is.

Twister Malone and Chuckaluck Thompson are making their way through a West Texas canyon when they smell death. Finally, the two emerge onto the mesa, where they encounter the site of a massacre. A whole family of deer lies dead around a small pond, their skeletons bleached by the Texas sun. Someone has poisoned the water hole. Then a rider comes around the corner, rifle in hand, and gets the drop on Twister and Chuckaluck.

A lone rider stops at the border, preparing to return to the United States for the first time in three years. When he left for Mexico, the Rio Kid was 18, a terrified youngster fleeing a fraudulent murder charge. He returns a grown man, with blood on his hands and twin .45s on his hips. His destination is a small town in Arizona, where he plans to clear his name and reclaim his legacy. But there is a lot of trail between here and there. Wanted signs paper every border town, offering $10,000 for the Rio Kid - dead or alive.

The Vietnam draft is removing the staff of a rural Wisconsin bar one by one. Dishboys, bouncers, and a bartender named Roger are the latest to get induction notices, each showing a proud face while secretly terrified to face the medical examiners who will determine their fate. When help comes from an unexpected place, new problems arise. Shortlisted for Best American Short Stories 2015, Larson's intimate psychological portrait of fear takes the familiar and turns it into something utterly original.

Shortly before September 11, 2001, Joe Biden warned, "The question is not if we will be attacked by terrorists, but rather when and where." In the pages of No Safe Place, terrorism has come to America once again. Sleeper agents for a radical Islamic terrorist group that calls itself Ansar Inshallah have managed to blend into American society and go undetected - until now.

Twelve-year-old Gitanjali Rao, appalled by the tragedy in Flint, Michigan, found a cheaper, more effective way to test for lead in drinking water. Four undocumented teenagers from an underfunded high school in Phoenix built an underwater robot from spare parts. At fifteen, William Kamkwamba used materials from junkyards near his home in Malawi to build a windmill to generate electricity and pump water for his village. Science educator and professor Fred Estes explores the motivation, challenges, and lives of these teen scientists and explains the science behind each invention.

This promise comes from Emma Baine; her attempts to end her family company’s 200-year history of murder and monopoly in the pursuit of profits leads to her violent death - at the hands of her brother, Carson. To consolidate his power and take over Kraken Corporation, Carson imprisons his enemies within the USS Alcatraz, an old Russian nuclear sub retrofitted into an underwater prison. Everything is falling into place...except for ex-Marine Vaughan, Emma’s former lover and bodyguard. He’s tough, smart, and very angry.

Thelma and Ezra have decided it is time to move forward with their plans to have a family, but first they need to move to a larger living space. When Thelma finds her “home sweet home” and they make it so, things begin to change in unsettling ways. Ezra sees what’s happening, but Thelma doesn’t - not really. He must find a way to save them before it’s too late.

Four months ago Beau Epstein watched his parents die. For 14 years he lived with his family in the jungle village of Santa María, ignoring the outside world. It was paradise until the civil war came to find them. His parents were gunned down in the streets, and Beau found himself suddenly alone in the world. His grandfather, an old-school Hollywood mogul, sends for the child.

A double dose of Western action from one of the genre's acknowledged masters. The first story, "The Rodeo Killer", is a smoldering tale of the violent intersecting conflict between New Mexico cattle ranchers, cattle buyers, and men breeding horses for the rodeo circuit. The title story, "Mission Creek", tells the fiery tale of Ruel Starrett, a man who worked against the odds his whole life to establish his own ranch. He finally gets his chance when he's offered a half interest in the Spade Ranch from a woman named Susanna Dahlhart. But she isn't all she appears.

Vicky Clay awakens with chills. She's still glowing from her victory in last night's steeplechase - the genteel form of horseracing for which the Virginia gentry lives and dies - but that's not why her skin tingles. She has been poisoned, and within seconds she's as useless to the world as a thoroughbred with a broken leg. The stakes are high in the world of Virginia horseracing, where fortunes are won and lost by a hair.