Western Crime Fiction

After a life of crime, Azri's found a calling as a Weapons Caster, notorious for their powerful dusters and ability to assemble guns only a Weapons Caster can handle. When his old partner in crime comes to town looking for his missing wife, and involves a jealous guild member, Azri may find himself in over his head. The rules of a Caster are strict, but harboring a criminal should be the least of his worries.

A young woman is found laid out on top of a coral sarcophagus in the Key West Cemetery, her nude body wrapped carefully in a white silk sheet tied at the waist with a wide red ribbon and a diamond ring in her mouth. Key West detectives David Sharkey and Doug Webber are baffled by the bazaar staging of the body. As they start their investigation, Titus Steel, a young private investigator from Miami, offers to help with valuable information that this has happened twice before.

Three victims have been found, all killed in the same manner. Drowned when their cars were submerged in the Sacramento River. The killer’s trademark is an obscene word written on the side of each victim’s car. The police have few clues, but the victims all have one thing in common: they were aggressive, inconsiderate, mean drivers. They paid the ultimate price. When the vigilante is classified as a serial killer, the FBI steps in to help.

Follow Jamie, a 10-year-old American boy who was kidnapped from his school and smuggled out of the country along with dozens of other children. After hearing a shocking story about his parents and why he was kidnapped, he forms a bond with one of his captors and makes friends with some of the other children. Knowing the fate that awaits him and the other children, Jamie fears these newfound relationships won’t last.

The Man Who Moiled for Gold draws its title from the Robert W. Service poem: "The Cremation of Sam McGee". The poem tells of suffering, loneliness, frustration, and ultimately death. Charley Martin experienced all of these emotions along with love and success while becoming the man who moiled for gold. Charley Martin, in 1912, is found mining the hard rock of Butte, Montana. Years of breathing the fine quartz dust in the pits have given Charley silicosis. Discovery of this incurable condition, by the mine super, brought an abrupt change to the 69-year old miner's life.

One murdered girl. One unknown killer. One legendary lawman. A lone man sits his horse atop a bluff near the southern Missouri border. There's a story in the country ahead of him. A dark tale of murdered girls and a killer not caught, of an old friend asking for help, and a letter from a frightened young mother that has arrived too late to save her daughter. A letter that now rests in this man's pocket.....

A bounty hunter always catches his man, even if the men he is chasing are dangerous gang-bangers and murderers. Mysterious bounty hunter Spade is hired by the new governor of Texas when voters start to become terrified of the crime waves that are taking over the state. Spade is ordered to kill Gomez and Santez, two of the most wanted murderers in Texas. He is given permission to use any force necessary to get the job done.

Winter, 1945. The Second World War is over, but it is a time of armistice, not peace. Austria is grieving its defeat and the loss of a generation of men; it is a land without leaders. To men like Major Mark Hanlon, Occupation Commander of the alpine town of Bad Quellenberg, falls the task of destroying the legacy of the Nazis once and for all. When his driver is murdered by an Austrian soldier, Hanlon is determined to bring the man to justice. But investigating the crime proves difficult in a community where nearly everyone has something to hide.

Former Sheriff’s Investigator Cassie Dewell is starting over with her own private investigation firm. She’s her own boss answering to no one - and that’s just the way she likes it. But it’s all going to change when an old friend calls in a favour: she wants Cassie to help exonerate a man accused of assaulting a young woman from an influential family. Against her own better judgement, Cassie agrees. But out by the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana, twisted family loyalty runs as deep as the ties to the land, and there’s always something more to the story.

Dennis and Sarah Coleman wake up one Sunday to find the message "You’re all grounded!" on both of their phones. They at first think it’s a prank, but they soon figure out that they and their two young children are locked in the house and their communications with the outside world have been severed. They then get a phone call and learn that they are at the mercy of a psychopath hell-bent on punishing them for their sins. They must do as he says if they ever want to leave their house alive.

Mick McCreary is an oilman out of a job. His only possessions are a plane ticket to Singapore, a month's pay in Indonesian rupiahs and the luck of the Irish. When the mysterious Mr Rubensohn approaches him with the offer of a breathtaking salary for a drilling operation on a remote island - no questions asked - he thinks that luck is running with him once more. But then he meets the beautiful Lisette, and within 24 hours he is involved in murder, intrigue and an international fraud of frightening proportions.

A journalist who uncovers a story which will overthrow a corrupt Italian politician but things become complicated when he falls in love with the politician's wife. Richard Ashley is a journalist who cares about the truth, and he's about to break the greatest story of his career. Italy's ruling clique is rotten to the core. A scandal centred around Vittorio, Duke of Orgagna, points to a web of corruption and deceit emanating from his estate in the south. But Ashley finds that the truth is not all it seems when he falls in love with Orgagna's wife.

In a secessionist rural state that has cut itself off completely from urban centres, where living is hardscrabble and poor but “free”, Brooke Holland runs a farm with her husband and two daughters. Their existence at the fringes of modern society is tenuous - they make barely enough from each harvest to keep going - yet Brooke cherishes the loving, peaceful life they have carved out for themselves. She has even begun to believe she is free from the violent history she has kept a secret from her family.

Polly McClusky ist elf und eigentlich zu alt für den Teddybären, den sie überallhin mitnimmt, als überraschend ihr Vater vor ihr steht. Nate ist aus dem Gefängnis ausgebrochen, um Polly das Leben zu retten. Denn auf Polly ist ein Kopfgeld ausgesetzt. Nate hat sich im Knast einen mächtigen Feind gemacht: die Gang Aryan Steel hat ihn und seine Familie zu Freiwild erklärt. Nates Exfrau wurde bereits getötet, Polly ist die nächste auf der Liste.

Was wäre, wenn... Jeremiah Cotton und Philippa Decker schon im 19. Jahrhundert gelebt hätten? Dem Jahrhundert des Goldrausches, des amerikanischen Bürgerkriegs und des Eisenbahnbaus? Cotton geht seinem Dienst als einfacher Streifenpolizist in New York nach. Gleichzeitig findet die Pinkerton-Agentin Philippa Decker heraus, dass eine Reederei chinesische Arbeiter, die für die Eisenbahn angeworben werden, zum Schmuggeln von Rohopium benutzt.

Heller is caught up in a dangerous crossfire as he cozies up to the local "coyote," a slimeball that takes desperate Mexicans across the river in the dead of night for a heavy fee and then sets them up to be robbed, beaten, and even raped by bandidos. The frightened prey are powerless, nobody cares, except Heller, and that ole mountain boy knows more than one way to skin a coyote.

Sometimes bad people just need to go down, and for whatever reason, there's usually no one else around to do it. He just wanted to pass through town unnoticed, but vicious outlaws made his business their own and picked a fight he was desperate to avoid. The worst sin yet, they've targeted an innocent woman and her child in their schemes. Austin must now take up his gun and do what he hates but is better at than anyone else: fight without mercy, fight to the end, and win at all costs....

Tex Waco is a Texas oil billionaire who heads up the group of rich Texas vigilantes known as the Texas Twelve. Some drug dealing criminals, with connections that reach into the highest levels of government, make the fatal mistake of killing a friend of Tex Waco. Tex and his group of men waste no time in giving the criminals a lethal dose of 45-caliber Texas justice.

In the winter of 1897, a trio of killers descends upon an isolated farm in upstate New York. Midwife Elspeth Howell returns home to the carnage: her husband and four of her children, murdered. Before she can discover her remaining son, Caleb, alive and hiding in the kitchen pantry, another shot rings out over the snow-covered plains. Twelve-year-old Caleb nurses his mother back to health, cleaning her wounds and keeping her fed, before they leave their home to seek retribution on the men who committed this heinous crime.

A questo autore dall'inconfondibile vena pessimista e cruda, dall'originale scrittura raffinata e apparentemente naturale, tratta dal linguaggio parlato, ma piena di intrusioni e slanci d'autore, appartiene una serie di romanzi dimenticati, a metà tra il romanzo criminale e il western. A questo filone, quasi sfociante nel dramma antirazzista, che allora furoreggiava in certo cinema e in certo teatro americano alla Tennessee Williams, appartiene "Rossa".