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Author
Series
Summary
The Time It Never Rained helped convince the Western Writers of America to declare seven-time Spur Award winner Elmer Kelton the greatest Western writer of all time. Forged from Kelton's 1950s observations of drought-ravaged West Texas, this compelling novel tells the story of one rancher's struggle to maintain his independence despite the swirling winds of change. For decades, Charlie Flagg has eked out a living by raising cattle and sheep on his...
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Hewey Calloway has a problem. In his west Texas home of 1906, the land and way of life he loves are changing too quickly. As Hewey struggles against the relentless stream of progress, he comes to realize that the simple life of his childhood is vanishing - and that every choice he makes requires a sacrifice. --
Author
Summary
Ivan Doig grew up in the rugged wilderness of western Montana among the sheepherders and denizens of small-town saloons and valley ranches. What he deciphers from his past with piercing clarity is not only a raw sense of land and how it shapes us but also of the ties to our mothers and fathers, to those who love us, and our inextricable connection to those who shaped our values in our search for intimacy, independence, love, and family. A powerfully...
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This entry in Elmer Kelton's Tales of Texas series whisks us away to witness a violent 1875 conflict. Thirty years after the Battle of San Jacinto, Texans and Mexicans are still spilling blood over control of the Nueces Strip. And Horse thieves and bushwhackers transform this hot, dry stretch between the Nueces and the Rio Grande rivers into a lawless inferno. Despite long odds, Captain McNelly and his small band of Texas Rangers strive to bring lasting...
5) Morning star
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Driven from his home, a Rebel finds a place among the Cheyenne. Joel Ryan returns from the Civil War with grey hair and a weary heart, but he finds no rest in Kentucky. Turned away by a brother who still blames Joel for abandoning the family to fight for the Confederate cause, Joel rides west, searching for peace in the untamed wilderness of Montana. Instead, against all odds, he finds love. When he sees the gang of thugs tormenting the young Cheyenne...
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From one of the West's greatest living storytellers, winner of numerous awards, including the Spur, the Golden Saddleman, and the Western Heritage Award, here is Elmer Kelton's magnificent new novel of the wildcat West Texas oil boom of the 1920s. It used to be that the worst crime in Caprock was moonshining or lying about your Saturday night date on Sunday morning-until someone struck oil. Now the scent of the stuff has brought every dreamer, drifter,...
8) Tenbow
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At the foot of the Wind River Mountains and just east of the continental divide was Tenbow Valley, eighty miles of rich, watered graze on the way to Oregon territory. From Cheyenne, Jack Stillman has come to Tenbow to solve a string of murders. Each victim was a landowner in the valley, and each killing was carried out with a deadly, long range rifle. Taking on the guise of a gambler, Stillman is quick to line up his suspects and start prying open...
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In the Texas backlands in 1885, twelve-year-old Joey Shipman's father dies under mysterious circumstances, and the boy is forced to live with his stepmother and Blair Meacham, a hanger-on at the farm. After the death of a black farmhand and friend, and another "accident”, that almost takes Joey's life, the boy runs away and joins forces with his only kin-Beau Shipman, a drunk and a jailbird. Beau, along with an outlaw, a San Antonio prostitute,...
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WHERE THE LIVING IS HARD AND THE KILLING IS EASY... It's in the lawless Indian Territory that Daniel Strange meets his demise. Riding his chestnut mare to Texas to buy himself some cattle, the best gunsmith in St. Joseph, Missouri, gets waylaid by a pack of murdering outlaws. His lifeless body is left dangling at the end of a rope -- robbing his family of a loving husband and father. ...DEATH CAN'T KEEP A GOOD MAN DOWN Now, a mysterious gunslinger...
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Often hailed as the heir apparent to Wallace Stegner, Ivan Doig is among the finest chroniclers of the contemporary American West. In Mountain Time, Lexa McCaskell and Mitch Rozier leave their Seattle home to visit Mitch's dying father in Montana. There Mitch clashes with both Lexa and his father as events from the past are explored and difficult memories resurface.
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"Parker Stanley's family had a dream: to start a new life in the Far West. But en route, a Cheyenne band slaughters his parents and abducts his sister, leaving him for dead. Then a cowboy named Clay Springer rides to the rescue - and comes up with an idea. He's got a team ready to deliver goods to the Mormons in Utah, but he's short on funds for supplies. He knows that Parker managed to hold on to his family's savings, so he suggests a fifty-fifty...
13) Bloodroot
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Lawyer-turned-herbalist China Bayles returns to the Deep South, where her family?s legacy of silence is at last broken?and the past finally, unforgettably, speaks the truth? A frantic phone call from her mother brings China back to her family?s Mississippi plantation?a place she?d forsaken long ago. But the late-spring air is thick with fear?and from the moment of her arrival, China knows that something has gone desperately wrong at Jordan?s Crossing....
14) The Chili Queen
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Her protective instincts brought out by Emma, who was sent to New Mexico to marry a man she has never met, Addie French takes her new friend under her wing, and the pair begins unfolding secrets, hatching schemes, and questioning everything they once believed.
15) The cold dish
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Appears on these lists
Summary
After twenty-five years as sheriff of Absaroka County, Walt Longmire's hopes of finishing out his tenure in peace are dashed when Cody Pritchard is found dead near the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Two years earlier, Cody has been one of four high school boys given suspended sentences for raping a local Cheyenne girl. Somebody, it would seem, is seeking vengeance, and Longmire might be the only thing standing between the three remaining boys and...
16) Apache storm
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Jason Manning, a popular Western author, sets this tale at the beginning of the Civil War. Lt. Joshua Barlow, just out of West Point, is sent into the West by his influential father, who hopes he will be safer there. However, a different conflict is being waged on the plains. Kiannatah and his band of Apache warriors are determined to fight those who dare to invade their land-no matter how much blood is spilled.
17) Dakota
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Teddy Roosevelt's wife and mother died on the same night in his home in New York City. To outdistance his grief, he turned his back on a promising political career and fled to the badlands to restore his spirit through a thrilling adventure in the Wild West.
18) Dead man's bones
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When China's teenage son finds some skeletal remains during a local cave dig, remains that show a not-so-accidental death, it's a disturbing development. But China doesn't let it distract her from the opening of the new community theater donated by the elderly Obermann sisters. Unfortunately, the haughty, bullying Jane Obermann, and her frail, frightened younger sister made the donation with a condition: that the first production be a play written...
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Smoke Jensen was once the fastest draw in the West. He was also tired of taking on every tinhorn upstart out to make a reputation. So Jensen hung up his .45s for good--or so he thought. Called to Texas, Jensen must help rancher Richard King face an insane former Union captain who intends to burn the King ranch to the ground.
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Sheriff Cray Dawson's quick-draw reputation keeps most criminals away from his Texas town of Somos Santos. But it doesn't keep the motley Walker Gang away for long. Although they temporarily divert their bankrobbing plans to a neighboring town, they soon stumble on a way to weaken him. But will a strategic kidnapping and an unexpected ally undermine Dawson's resolve to do what he must?