Historical Thriller America

A collection of stories capturing what it means to be a cowboy.

A collection of stories from the most famous Western author of all time! Desert Death-Song is a compilation of some of Louis L’Amour’s greatest stories, many of which might otherwise be difficult to find. Whether he was writing under his early pen name, Jim Mayo, or his own, L’Amour’s stories are unforgettable, touching on rough and rugged American ideals, and set in the untamable frontier of the Western United States.

One man finds himself torn between two cultures in this sweeping tale of frontier life in post–Civil War era Texas. In the years following the American War Between the States, the once vacated military presence in west Texas is on the rise to protect the waves of settlers moving into the region. Living peaceably with the Mescalero Apache, half-breed former military scout Holton Lang promotes the tentative harmony between the US cavalry and the Native American population.

Richard Sharpe, asked to help an old friend, meets, at last, the greatest enemy. Five years after the Battle of Waterloo, Sharpe's peaceful retirement in Normandy is shattered. An old friend, Don Blas Vivar, is missing in Chile, reported dead at rebel hands--a report his wife refuses to believe. She appeals to Sharpe to find out the truth. Sharpe, along with Patrick Harper, finds himself bound for Chile via St. Helena, where they have a fateful meeting with the fallen emperor Napoleon.

Andy Adams (1859-1935) was born to pioneer parents in Indiana, worked in Texas for a decade driving cattle, and settled in Colorado Springs, where he penned his cowboy narratives. The Log of a Cowboy chronicles a five-month drive of three thousand head of cattle from Brownsville, Texas, to the Blackfoot Indian Reservation in Montana. This classical work of fiction provides fascinating insights of everyday life on the Great Western Cattle Trail with a team of 12 cowhands, a cook, a horse wrangler and a foreman.

Morton Farrier, the esteemed English forensic genealogist, had cleared a space in his busy schedule to track down his own elusive father finally. But he is then presented with a case that challenges his research skills in his quest to find the killer of a woman murdered more than 180 years ago. Thoughts of his own family history are quickly and violently pushed to one side as Morton rushes to complete his investigation before other sinister elements succeed in derailing the case.

The year is 1878, peak of the Texas cattle trade. The place is Dodge City, Kansas, a saloon-filled cow town jammed with liquored-up adolescent cowboys and young Irish hookers. Violence is random and routine, but when the burned body of a mixed-blood boy named Johnnie Sanders is discovered, his death shocks a part-time policeman named Wyatt Earp. And it is a matter of strangely personal importance to Doc Holliday, the frail 26-year-old dentist who has just opened an office at No. 24, Dodge House.

Betty Jane Welch reluctantly enters the Miss Delaware contest to make her mother happy and, surprisingly, finds herself to be the judges' choice. Just like that, she's catapulted into the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City. Her pageant-approved escort for the week is the dashing, mercurial Griffin McAllister, and she falls for him hard. But when she unexpectedly wins the crown, she finds she may lose what she wants most: Griff.

Captain Jim Agnihotri and his wife Lady Diana Framji are embarking to England in the summer of 1894. Jim is hopeful the cruise will help Diana open up to him. Something is troubling her, and Jim is concerned. On their first evening, Jim meets an intriguing Spaniard, a fellow soldier with whom he finds an instant kinship. But within twenty-four hours, Don Juan Nepomuceno is murdered, his body discovered shortly after he asks rather urgently to see Jim.

At the start of a new century, a shocking murder transfixes Manhattan, forcing bitter rivals Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr to work together to save a man from the gallows. Just before Christmas 1799, Elma Sands slips out of her Quaker cousin’s boarding house—and doesn’t come home. Has she eloped? Run away? No one knows—until her body appears in the Manhattan Well. Her family insists they know who killed her. Handbills circulate around the city accusing a carpenter named Levi Weeks of seducing and murdering Elma. But privately, quietly, Levi’s wealthy brother calls in a special favor.

They are just about as bad and evil as outlaw gangs come. But in the end, they finally go straight.

Why would a collector of ancient American artifacts hand over his prized pieces to a historian and then shoot himself in the head? And why does an ancient Templar scroll in his possession refer to Jesus as "The Thief on the Cross"? The answers place historian Cameron Thorne at the dangerous intersection of secret American history and modern geopolitical intrigue.

A mysterious race of North American giants. An ancient Hebrew inscription in a Cherokee burial mound. A blood oath made by blindfolded Freemasons. Are these three historical oddities the reason the CIA is trying to brainwash historian Cameron Thorne and his fiancee Amanda Spencer-Gunn? The answer lies buried in the legends of the Knights Templar, within the rituals of the secretive Freemasons and, most significantly of all, inside the bowels of the Smithsonian Institution

Attorney Cameron Thorne is thrust into a bloody tug-of-war involving secret societies, treasure hunters, and keepers of the secrets of the Jesus bloodline. Joined by Amanda, an enchanting British researcher with secrets of her own, Cam races around New England with only two choices - unravel the 600-year-old mysteries encoded in the ancient artifacts, or die trying.

After five years of virtual banishment because he sold out his small outfit to the Middle Arizona Cattle Company, giving it a foothold on the Mesa Grande range, violent-tempered Joe Bonnyman is summoned back to Lodgepole by his father when it appears that a cattle war between the syndicate and the various rangers is imminent. During his short stay in town, Joe has an unpleasant meeting with Ed Merrill, the brother of a girl Joe had once courted.

1800’s American West—a place where men find themselves in harsh and cruel circumstances and where lives are short lived. Traveling independently on the expansive road through the west, cowboy and Westerner Tomas H. Elkman is a man of the times. To ease the loneliness of the trail while searching for gainful employment, Elkman warily teams up with a fight-prone, good-timing gambler by the name of Jefferson McGredy. This strange pairing of men is hired to deliver an assemblage of horses to a ranch in the untamed northern territory.

Having fled to New York following his involvement in a terrible crime, Irish-born Danny McCabe throws in his lot with Nicolas and Lucia Mariani, Corsican siblings who have come to America to make their fortune. In New York the trio get by, earning money from fighting and - on Nicolas Mariani's part - increasingly illicit activity. Lucia has ambitions of becoming an actress, and, following a fight that goes horribly wrong, the three of them head to Los Angeles, the city of dreams.

Fact: In the 1980s, a Vatican archbishop and rogue group of Freemasons were implicated in the murder of Pope John Paul I. A decade later, that same cleric illicitly acquired an ancient Templar scroll directly undermining fundamental Church teachings. Today, historians Cameron Thorne and Amanda Spencer-Gunn stumble upon a sword engraved with a map leading to this hidden scroll. A pope was murdered the first time to keep the scroll a secret. Can Cam and Amanda escape a similar fate?

In one of the first crime novels ever set behind the scenes of big-time television, Clarence Budington Kelland has plotted a thrilling adventure of danger and death which climaxes in a series of fast-moving surprises. Peter Mortain, one of the youngest directors in this very young medium, was beleaguered enough, directing the first episode of the most expensive variety show ever produced. He had a cast whose first appearance on television made them skittish, a thousand technical details to handle, and a star…who was also his boss!

Twenty-nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln has spent his entire adult life running from his past - from the poverty of the dirt-floor log cabin where he was raised, from the dominion of his uneducated father, and from a failed early courtship. But now, Lincoln's past is racing back to haunt him. It is the summer of 1838, and Springfield is embroiled in a tumultuous, violent political season. All of Springfield's elite have gathered at a grand party to celebrate the Fourth of July. Spirits are high - until a prominent local politician is assassinated in the midst of fireworks.