Western Police Procedural Fiction

Big secrets run deep. Former FBI agent Jack McBride took the job as chief of police for Stillwater, Texas, to start a new life with his teenage son, Ethan, away from the suspicions that surrounded his wife's disappearance a year earlier. With a low crime rate and a five-man police force, he expected it to be a nice, easy gig; hot checks, traffic violations, some drugs, occasional domestic disturbances, and petty theft. Instead, within a week he is investigating a staged murder-suicide.

Spur Award winner Craig Johnson has garnered critical acclaim for his Walt Longmire mysteries. In this riveting seventh entry, Wyoming's Absaroka County Sheriff Walt Longmire is pushed beyond his limits. When three hardened convicts escape FBI custody in a mountain blizzard, an armed psychopath leads them up Big Horn Mountain. As Longmire struggles to track their treacherous ascent, he'll need all the help he can get from the tribal spirits of the towering summit.

Jon Talbot is a history professor who makes sense of the past by examining facts. He also knows how to speculate about the what-ifs. Jon’s doing both following the death of his wife, Pax. Driving home late from a volunteer assignment, she plunged off a mountain highway and died. The police find nothing suspicious about the facts: a deer in the road, a blown tire, a broken neck. But the what-ifs are leading Jon down a twisting trail of secrets. After five years of marriage, he is finally getting to know his wife.

No one liked Jake Kinsey. A rich man, he turned up out of nowhere, acquired Exmouth’s trophy penthouse flat, and then bought his way into the local rowing club. And now he’s dead. D/S Jimmy Suttle, a newcomer to the Devon and Cornwall force from his old job on Major Crimes in Portsmouth, is the one detective who suspects that Kinsey has been killed. His boss, beset by budget cuts and the pressure of other cases, needs to move on. The enquiry is dead in the water.

Special Agent Tucker Snow knows there's big money roaming the fields under the wide Texas sky—and the cattle rustlers committing large-scale thefts on remote ranches know it, too. But when a prominent local rancher dies unexpectedly and his property is quietly sold to an unknown buyer, Tucker suspects there's something more sinister going on in his jurisdiction than the usual steal-and-resell racket. Still raw after the tragic death of his wife and young daughter, the lawman can't bear the thought of more innocent lives destroyed by people whose greed poisons everything around them.

Investigator James Creed has finally settled into life in San Francisco with his found family, the Brotherhood of the Golden Cog. Though he misses his adult daughter, he has a criminal leader to track down—an outlaw who murders innocents, enslaves the downtrodden, and uses machines to alter the bodies and minds of his many victims.

When the sheriff is murdered, his son is asked to take his place. Bobby Trent is a semi-retired rodeo cowboy and the son of a highly respected law officer. When his father, the sheriff, is murdered, Trent is asked to fulfill the remaining months of his term in office. Sheriff Bobby Trent; nobody would have guessed it, but it should be an easy enough task; drink a little coffee, maybe lead a parade. Easy work until he is healthy enough to return to the circuit.

When a county employee is found shot to death in sun-drenched daylight while sitting in his county road grader, Undersheriff Bill Gastner is faced with puzzling questions. The simplest explanation - that an errant bullet from a careless target shooter’s rifle blew out Larry Zipoli’s brains - is soon discarded as inconsistencies surface. The fatal bullet shows no rifling marks, and investigation shows that the shooter walked directly toward the road grader, in full view of the victim - who did nothing to defend himself.

Former Posadas County Sheriff Bill Gastner, now a New Mexico Livestock Inspector, is enjoying a day on Herb Torrances. But Bill soon finds himself ferrying a broken cowpuncher in the back of his SUV, headed out to meet an ambulance.

The hardworking single mother of young daughter, Joanna Brady still feels the acute pain of loneliness and loss, the hole that was left in her heart when her policeman husband was murdered. But Sheriff Brady is the law in Cochise County, and murder has shattered the small town's fragile peace. A local gun dealer has died violently, and his stock of high-powered weapons has been cleared out. When two more slayings follow soon after, suspicion falls upon rancher Alton Hosfield.

A trail robbery and multiple murders end up as the problem of Ranson Nye, town marshal of Temptation, Texas. This town built in the hopes of taking the last dollars from tired cowboys headed back home after cattle drives to Kansas is becoming more than it ever intended to be. When a newspaper comes to town, almost everything changes for this dusty little spot on the Red River across from The Indian Territory. When Mother Nature intervenes, tragedy brings out secrets and hidden talents. Add a Texas Ranger to the mix and we have Bad News in Temptation.