Showing results by narrator "Joe Smith" in All Categories

In the dark shadow of the Prophecy Mountains lies the ramshackle town of Rattlesnake Wells, where dreamers come to make their fortunes, and desperados come to die. The streets of this little settlement are slick with mud and stained with blood, and it will fall to Bob Hatfield to sweep them clean. The town marshal, Hatfield has a young man’s face, but his eyes are those of a killer. He is a good man, but he has a secret that weighs on his soul.

The son of legendary gunman Frank Morgan, Conrad Browning goes by the name Kid Morgan - the Loner - and forged a growing reputation of his own. But in the midst of a fight for his life, the Kid discovered that he too was a father: of twins he'd never met. Now, the Kid heads back east to pierce a mystery guarded by murderous criminals for hire. Why is his ex-fiancée hiding his children from him? And why is this secret worth killing to keep?

When a farmer's wife is murdered, an innocent man is accused: Patrick O'Brien. The book-loving brother had shared his love of literature with the woman, but her husband claims she spurned Pat's advances and that's why he killed her. Now it looks like Patrick will swing from the gallows - especially after his lawyer is targeted, too.

The war continues, and the undead ravage the land. Jirom, Horace, and Emanon begin to hope they might free the empire. But can they manage to do so before the dark king conquers the world?

Michael is branded a traitor as a child because of the murder of the king’s 9-year-old son, by his father David Kingman. Ten years later on Michael lives a hardscrabble life, with his sister Gwen, performing crimes with his friends against minor royals in a weak attempt at striking back at the world that rejects him and his family. In a world where memory is the coin that pays for magic, Michael knows something is there in the hot white emptiness of his mind.

Jane Candia Coleman is a natural storyteller whose characters come from the lands between the southwestern valleys of Arizona and the Gila Mountains of New Mexico. The night Billy the Kid died is hauntingly depicted in "Corrido for Billy". "Lady Flo" is a memoir, based on historical fact, of the black wife of an Irish nobleman. "Moving On" depicts a young girl abandoned by her family who finds her way with an itinerant Jewish peddler. And "Are You Coming Back, Phin Montana?" is the winner of the 1995 Spur Award for Best Western Short Fiction.

Shaw's forte was her ability to create interesting casts of characters through whom and between whom she was able to develop a suspenseful and unpredictable interplay. This story is a good example of her character driven Western fiction.

Two young men in the gold fields of California spend a last evening together as one of them, very sick, confronts his own imminent death. The tenderness between them may seem idealized, but you understand by listening to this story how premature death from accident and disease haunted the lives of far more westerners than death by violence.

Bill Ash, an escaped convict returns to find his father murdered.

A quick-draw tale from the wild west. T. T. Flynn has long been popular with listeners as a master of the Western story.

Haseloff's characters embody the fundamental values - honor, duty, courage, and family - that prevailed on the American frontier and were instilled in the young Haseloff by her own "heroes", her mother and her grandmother. Her stories, in a sense, dramatize how these values endure when challenged by the adversities and cruelties of frontier existence.

When Harry French left home he was just another kid looking to make his way. But when he comes back four years later, things are different. He's different. Or at least the town thinks so. Now nobody looks him in the eye. He isn't just Harry anymore, he's the Shifter, a gunfighter who brings trouble with him wherever he goes. And as hard as Harry tries, he finds that a reputation is a lot harder to put down than a gun.

Brother Shotgun is about an old buffalo hunter whose return to the plains after the Civil War keeps being delayed by the needs of a young woman who has taken in a number of orphans.

A short story gem in a Western setting...the search of a man for beauty, and how and where he found it.

Captain Cade Williams and the newly formed Echo Team are sent to the city of Boston to investigate reports of a mysterious blood cult and the disappearance of several members of the Templar Order. What they find will have repercussions that echo well into the future....This story introduces the character of Cade Williams, a former Boston SWAT officer who developed certain unusual powers in the wake of an encounter with a supernatural entity known as the Adversary.

When Knight Commander Cade Williams discovers that his wife, Gabrielle, is not truly dead, but held in some kind of arcane stasis between the lands of the living and the lands of the dead, he vows that nothing will stop him from freeing her soul from the prison surrounding her. But his vow is tested right from the start when an old friend calls on him to help protect the city of Boston from the ancient scourge that threatens to destroy it, leaving Cade with a heart-breaking choice.

Does Horace have the power and strength to save what he fought so hard to win? In a setting reminiscent of ancient Egypt and Babylon, where God-Kings and God-Queens hold the power of life and death, Horace, the one-time slave who became a powerful magician, has turned the tables on his former masters. Follow Horace, Alyra, and Jirom as they navigate the hurdles of managing the slave rebellion under the Akeshian Empire's nose. But evil is not content to sit back and let them gather their strength. A new threat is coming in the form of an unstoppable army of the walking dead.

In a setting reminiscent of ancient Egypt and Babylon, where God-Kings and God-Queens hold the power of life and death in their hands, Horace, the one-time slave who became a powerful magician, has turned the tables on his former masters. Follow Horace, Alyra, and Jirom as they navigate the hurdles of managing the slave rebellion under the Akeshian Empire's nose. But evil is not content to sit back and let them gather their strength. A new threat is coming in the form of an unstoppable army of the walking dead.

Bad luck has driven half-breed Yakima Henry and Sheriff Jack Kelly into the town of Dead River during a severe mountain winter - where Yakima must weather a killer who's hell-bent on making the town as dead as its name.

Half-white, half-Cheyenne Yakima Henry has been ambushed and badly injured. Bleeding to death, he doesn't know who'll get to him first: the gunslingers or hungry wolves. Thankfully, comely widow Aubrey Coffin comes along and drags Yakima to safety. But as he heals, lawless desperados circle closer to finish the job they started by putting his innocent savior in the cross fire.