Showing results by narrator "Richard Thomas" in All Categories

"When I started to write The Looking Glass, I intended to create a story about the healing power of hope and love. But as this story developed, a message began to emerge that I had not foreseen, a message about the distorted mirror in which we view ourselves, binding ourselves with shackles of self-doubt and fear."

Transformed by the nuclear conflict of 2001, the Earth had turned into a wasteland ruled by anarchy and barbarism. Heirs to this blighted world, Ryan Cawdor and his warrior wayfarers fight for survival...and a way to restore humanity's lost promise. The preholocaust redoubts housing the dangerous and unpredictable mat-trans units are the legacy of the whitecoat scientists and their precocious knowledge. For the very few in the know, the network of redoubts serves as an escape route and transport through the bleak landscape.

The crew of the US space vessel Aquila returns from a deep-space mission to find that a devastating plant blight has stripped away all civilization, its legacy a nightmarish wasteland. In what's left of the world, the only law is tooth and claw, kill or be killed. Traveling through the savaged countryside to wrest from death surviving kin and friends, the astronauts grimly cling to a glimmer of promise for a new start. Far to the northwest is Aurora, a secret base offering a way out of the decline into darkness.

The lethal plant cancer know as Earthblood had destroyed life on the planet in a matter of months, leaving a barren wilderness road where markers are corpses and cities are death traps. Into this nightmarish world the crew of the United States space vessel Aquila returned, a world of grim hunger and sudden death.

The Earth is laid waste by a devastating blight that destroys the world's food supply. Mass starvation wipes out millions almost overnight. Society collapses, and those who survive must contend with renegade groups striving for naked power. A new currency comes into existence - precious food and the force of arms that helps get it at any cost.

The news is bad. The stage driver's wife who is expecting a child has taken a serious fall and now needs her husband. Dave Judd will take his place driving the stagecoach filled with passengers who want to get through before the bitter cold that is lifting becomes a blizzard.

Tom Dallas has changed his way of living. All the shootings in which he was involved were justified, but there are many who want his scalp which prompts him to make a vow that he will not pack bullets in his .45 for a year. Then a situation develops that can only result in breaking his vow.

Matt North's secret plan to force an entire range to reverse its decision to raise sheep.

Matt Hurst seeks justice when a sheriff's posse kills his father and brothers.

About the fascinating Mrs. King, young Rosalia Dures, and the strong, silent Tom Folliard. A story in which bullets supply the answer after all other ways fail.

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.

A cruel, hated man collects a fortune, then disappears in the desert. The Texas Rangers think it's murder and put one of their best on the job - but he'll need help. There's evil here that no one suspects.