Black Horse Westerns - October 2012

A Necktire for Gifford by Ethan Flagg

The bounty hunter known as 'Montero' learns that his brother is to be hanged for murder in the New Mexico town of Alamagordo. A single clue left by the dead man - the two letters 'MA' - ensures that a guilty verdict is inevitable. The two brothers had parted some years before under hostile circumstances, but Montero is convinced that Mace Gifford would never shoot a man in the back. He plans an ingenious escape, but saving his brother's neck is only the beginning. He has to find the real killer. And to make matters worse, a notorious Mexican outlaw has escaped and is hell-bent on taking revenge on the bounty hunter who caught him: Montero...

Trooper Dalton by Ed Law

After getting involved in a saloon-room brawl in Fort Lord, Dalton is arrested. His situation worsens when an unsympathetic judge sentences him to a year in jail unless he takes the alternative of signing up with the Plains Cavalry. Dalton reckons that anything will be better than breaking rocks, but when he joins Company H - known as Company Hell - he soon regrets his decision. The troopers are a motley collection of prisoners recruited from jailhouses, or gunslingers running from arrest warrants. As his fellow troopers are more determined to destroy the peace than to keep it, Dalton will need all his survival skills to serve out his term and all his ingenuity to defeat their plans.

Crazy Man Cade by Amos Carr

'Crazy Man Cade' has done it all. Foiled a stagecoach robbery, stopped a vicious beating of an elderly man, and halted the kidnapping of a pretty young girl from a crooked sheriff and his gang. But his life is changed forever when an Arapaho brave walks out of the trees and into his camp to tell him that Cade's oldest friend, Bear, the trapper, is dying. A perilous journey and a bloody battle with a gang of thugs delay their progress but earn Cade the respect of the Indians and they reach Bear in time to get him some help. Knowing that he would never be able to settle, will Cade deny his attraction to one of the Indian girls and ride away from his old friend and the possibility of a new life?

The Man from Cheyenne by Jack Edwardes

The last man to wear a sheriff's badge had finally been driven out of Jackson Creek. Jake Pierce was aiming higher than the profits from his Silver Lode saloon and, backed by a group of vicious gunfighters, he was planning to take over the town. So when Clay Harding rides from Cheyenne to bring back the rule of law he is sucked into a whirlpool of killing and the lure of gold. Knowing that he might never get back to Cheyenne he could console himself with one thought: with his faithful Colt in his hand he might just shoot his way out of trouble...

Double Cross Trail Drive Chet Cunningham

The journey begins as an ordinary trail drive from Texas to the railroad in Kansas. But it soon turns strange - and then deadly - as the camp-fire becomes a shooting target and rustlers try to steal the whole herd of steers. The crew beats them off and completes the drive, but back at the ranch in Texas the violence continues. The ranch owner seems to have become a sitting target and there are rumblings that the owner's son and his sister's husband do not get along. Whoever is out to ruin the ranch and kill the owner must be discovered, especially as a final deadly cattle stampede threatens to settle the matter once and for all...

Wild Bill Williams by Jack Martin

Official records show that some 80,000 Welshmen made their home in the place now known as the Wild West, though the true figure is likely to have been much higher. This is the story of one of those men. William Williams, otherwise known as Wild Bill Williams, is no stranger to trouble. It seems to follow him like a shadow. But even as a survivor of the Little Big Horn, as he claims, he has never before had to face the kind of trouble that he finds in the town of Stanton. When the bullets start to fly and the blood begins to run, Wild Bill is never far behind -

Judgement Trail by Rob Hill

At the outbreak of Civil War, regiments stationed along the Oregon Trail are posted back East to fight for the Union. Hastily assembled militia units seize control of the trail forts and wagon-trains are left vulnerable to exploitation and attack. Halted with a broken axle, westbound pioneers Eve Maddison and Wesley Jackson encounter a mysterious frontiersman known simply as 'Stranger'. They also run up against the vicious Viperine brothers, in charge of a local militia and plotting to extort money from the stranded pioneers. Stranger insists that everyone is judged by their actions on the trail. His philosophy of courage and self-reliance inspires Eve and Wesley to make a stand against the Viperines - and face up to some difficult truths...

Duel of Shadows by Billy Hall

Eli Lowenstein has been murdered, and Sam Murray wasn't the man who took his life. But when the accusers threaten to look in his saddle-bags he remembers the strange noises he heard that morning, and the talk of the planted evidence that had condemned Ephraim Harris to an untimely lynching. If the evidence is in his saddle-bags, he's sure it can only have been planted by Gar Newberry and he's also sure that if they find anything he'll swing from the end of a rope, just like old Ephraim. And there's no way Sam Murray is going to sit back and let them slip that noose over his head...