Joey couldn’t imagine a better 13th birthday. He’d been given his first pistol and now was going to join his six older brothers on tomorrow’s job. They were going to trust him with covering their escape after robbing the bank and he was determined to do it right. He was immensely proud to be a Hogan, and his tough brothers were his heroes.

Eighteen-year-old Garrett Shaw and his father spotted the rustlers and pulled their Winchesters. They kept their muzzles pointed away from the three men who were stealing eight steers from their small ranch to give them a chance to leave peaceably. When they started throwing lead, Garrett and his father began returning fire. Garrett hit one of the rustlers just as his father’s horse went down. Hours later, as the doctor examined his father’s injury, Garrett knew that it was now his responsibility to provide for his crippled father, mother, and sisters.

Luke Scott just needed to track down some rustlers.The biggest question he had as he rode form his ranch was what kind of idiot rustles cattle in Colorado in December? Three hours later, as he tried to find his way to safety in a howling blizzard, just staying alive was much more important. It was what he found when seeking emergency shelter that would alter his life forever.

Yavapai County in Arizona Territory was bigger than Pennsylvania, and Sheriff Sam Hicks and his three deputies were the only law that most of its residents knew. When China Joe’s gang knocked off the huge cash shipment heading for Prescott, Sheriff Hicks left his office unsure if this would be his last job one way or the other. He knew he had to retire soon, he didn’t expect to be alive in six months, whether it was from a .44 or his failing heart.

Sheriff Joe Brooks was talking to a young prisoner who gave him some incredibly bad news. Three notorious gangs of outlaws had merged into one large band big enough to take over entire towns in his sparsely populated county. It was when they began to terrorize his county that he had to act, and he’d have to take them on alone.

Kyle MacKenzie left Fort Omaha to head to do some scouting at Fort Sully in the Dakota Territory at the request of their new commander. He’d been riding west for a few hours with his packhorse in tow when he noticed a set of wagon tracks heading northwest that appeared to be just a couple of days old. It raised his curiosity, and as the tracks were going in the direction he was headed anyway, he followed.

After the final battle of the Civil War, Confederate Sergeant Travis Kane rode his Yankee horse away from Palmito Ranch to return to his ranch in Uvalde County. As he began the two-hundred-and-fifty-mile ride across West Texas, Travis was grateful for surviving the long, bloody war without being wounded. But now that the fighting was over, his biggest concern was for his young wife because he hadn’t received a letter from Lillian in almost two years.

Pinkerton Agent Ben Gray was being sent to Denver for another all-to-common request for confirmation of marital infidelity. He didn’t mind because he’d be able to go and visit his brother, who unknown to him, had just found a rich deposit of gold in his mine near Leadville.

Doc Holt listened to the boys at the other end of the bunkhouse as they joked about the night’s excitement, and he felt sick. What they were doing bothered him. Why they were doing it bothered him. But most of all, why he wasn’t doing anything to stop it bothered him.

US Deputy Marshal Earl Crawford had just entered the office after returning from a typically Texan assignment where bullets flew like dirt in a twister. He hadn’t even hung his hat when the boss approached him about an even more dangerous mission, but only if he chose to accept the job. Normally, he wasn’t given the choice, but in this case, even though he could have turned it down, he knew that he had to go.

Private Jake Elliott was apprehensive as he walked to the commander’s office. He couldn’t think of a single transgression that would have attracted the major’s attention. When he left the command building 10 minutes later, he was still numbed by the short visit. Tomorrow, he would no longer be a cavalryman, but would be returning to the family ranch outside of Fort Benton in Montana Territory. But it was the reason he was being discharged before his enlistment expired that had been the biggest shock.

The great state of Texas is a land of opportunity. For outlaws. And horse thieves. And cattle rustlers. Not to mention bank robbers, train robbers, and anything-that-ain’t-nailed-down robbers. The state’s governor, Richard B. Hubbard, is at the end of his rope. He wants to clean up Texas once and for all—and he’s desperate enough to try something crazy: hire a man who can do what the Texas Rangers can’t. A man not tied down by a wife or children. Or rules. Who’s not afraid to go outside the law.

Justice is a drifter with no fear and no memory, trailed by a violent past. Nora is a beautiful widow bravely raising her young son on an isolated New Mexican ranch. When a ruthless cattle baron pushes longhorns into the valley, Justice vows to protect Nora and her boy. But how can he succeed against thirty hired guns… including the four outlaws who left him for dead?

He's the son of a cattle rancher. A restless young dreamer who, under normal circumstances, would follow in his father's footsteps. Normal, however, is not his style. Like his famous grandfather and namesake Perley Gates - a hell-raising mountain man with a heavenly name - young Perley wants adventure, excitement, and freedom. And like his grandfather before him, he will find his dream - in the untamed wilds of a lawless frontier. That dream though might just become a nightmare....

After leaving his job as sheriff of Boulder, Sam Brown decides to visit his sister and her family on their ranch south of Denver, but discovers them all gone. He searches to find them, and what he discovers becomes his mission.

Private Jake Elliott was apprehensive as he walked to the commander’s office. He couldn’t think of a single transgression that would have attracted the major’s attention. When he left the command building 10 minutes later, he was still numbed by the short visit. Tomorrow, he would no longer be a cavalryman, but would be returning to the family ranch outside of Fort Benton in Montana Territory. But it was the reason he was being discharged before his enlistment expired that had been the biggest shock.

Joey couldn’t imagine a better 13th birthday. He’d been given his first pistol and now was going to join his six older brothers on tomorrow’s job. They were going to trust him with covering their escape after robbing the bank and he was determined to do it right. He was immensely proud to be a Hogan, and his tough brothers were his heroes.

Part epic of Texas, part classic coming-of-age story, part unflinching examination of the bloody price of power, The Son is a gripping and utterly transporting novel that maps the legacy of violence in the American west with rare emotional acuity, even as it presents an intimate portrait of one family across two centuries. Eli McCullough is just twelve-years-old when a marauding band of Comanche storm his Texas homestead and brutally murder his mother and sister, taking him as a captive.

Harry Glenn was asked to investigate the open and shut case of the murder of a prominent judge in Topeka, but he quickly realized that the crime was far from simple and wouldn’t be that simple to close, either.

This was supposed to be a journey to find his dream of starting his own spread. As he left the Bar L just northwest of Cheyenne and rode south into Colorado, Conn already knew where he wanted to build his ranch and had enough money to buy the land and get it started. It was just a hundred mile ride through open country. What could possibly go wrong?

He never looked back as he made his way through the gaslit streets without a penny in his pockets and no place to sleep. He should have been crushed by his desperation, but it was his anger and hate that drove him. He would use the one skill he had learned in those empty years that he now left behind him. He would enter the world of bareknuckle fighting and have to face older, stronger men to make his way in this hard world. He may be nothing, but he wasn’t going to go down without a fight.

United States Marshal War Adams stared at the telegram in disbelief. His father had been murdered? As difficult as it was to come to grips with the news, it would become more disturbing when he discovered that the person arrested for the crime was the nurse that his father had hired to ease his suffering from his killing disease. Her position gave her both the means and opportunity to commit the crime, and he knew that the nurse was the same woman whose husband he had shot and killed years earlier, giving her the motive.

Erich had been treated as a freak of nature for as long as he could remember. When he was twelve, he was bigger than any fully grown man in Brainerd. His defense against the constant taunts was to retreat into a shell which marked him as a dimwitted giant. He'd been working as a blacksmith for six years when he found himself without a job and decided to leave Minnesota for the far West. Maybe in Montana Territory he would be more readily accepted as just a man and not a monster.

When aging cowboy Gus Matthews gets fired from Rocking-C ranch for laying out the mean-spirited, know-nothing foreman, he heads north for Oklahoma, where he finds work with the Aronsons, an elderly couple whose ranch has seen better days. What should be easy work for kindly employers quickly turns sour when Gus discovers that the neighboring Slash-M ranch have been rustling the Aronsons’ cattle. Even worse, Gus becomes the corrupt sheriff’s main suspect in a string of violent crimes plaguing the county.

To start their new life together, Jamie Pratt and his young bride join a westward wagon train bound for the Rocky Mountains. They get as far as Helena when their unscrupulous wagon master deserts them, leaving them as good as dead in a godforsaken, blood-scorched land. The other settlers agree to set stakes where they are, but Jamie and his bride press on toward the Bitterroot Valley, deep into Sioux territory. They never come out the other side.

The loud roar snapped Mrs. Doyle from her sleep, and she quickly slid from her bedroll, stepped to the tents flap, and pulled it aside seeing a bear standing on its hind legs just a few feet from her. What made it more horrifying was what she didn't see. The camp behind the bear was empty. She dropped the flap and turned to her the frightened boy standing behind her. He looked at his equally terrified nanny unaware that they had been abandoned to die in the wilderness.

Captain Stan Murray was finally being mustered out of the army after all of the administrative snafus that had left him in Montana Territory long after the conclusion of the War Between the States. As he began his long journey, he wasn’t going home to Michigan. He had to cross hundreds of miles of hostile Indian Territory to reach Cheyenne City in Wyoming Territory to try and find the girl that he hadn’t seen in almost ten years. She was probably married and had three children by now, but he knew he had to at least know.

Fifteen-year-old Joe Beck wasn’t listening as the minister eulogized his uncle but was already planning on what he would have to do as soon as they returned to the Quimby farm. He wasn’t welcome there even before his uncle had died and knew that his cousin John would soon order him to leave. While he had had a basic idea of where he would go after he left the farm, he didn’t know what he would do with the rest of his life.

After twenty years of fighting; first the rebels and then the Apaches, Jonas was tired of it all and decided to return to his unfinished cabin to find the solace and peace that he craved. Yet once he’d returned the place to a livable condition, he realized that life wasn’t just about existing. He missed the camaraderie of the soldiers and he really wasn’t cut out for the life of a hermit. So, Jonas decided to return to his duties as an army scout at Fort Selden. The cabin would still be waiting for him when he was ready.

The Long Trail is the first book in the best-selling series about the McCabes, a family building a ranch in the rugged wilderness of post-Civil War Montana, and of a young man seeking his family and his destiny.