John D. Nesbitt Knihy

Blue Is Not the Word Rick Lemoore is drinking beer when he recognizes a backhoe operator named Tragg Tustin, who was said to have left town years earlier with Lynette Cole, a girl both of them had been dating. Seeing Tustin in town again, with a different woman, makes Rick wonder what ever happened to Lynette. Rick's curiosity picks up when he sees Tustin out driving the unpaved roads in the grasslands where Rick goes antelope hunting. Rick follows him for a while and watches from a distance. The next time Rick is out hunting, he is sure that Tustin is following him. Rick has a hunting rifle in the gun rack, but he is glad he has his pistol when something prompts him to take a look inside an old implement shed in the lonely ranch country. Buckskin Trail Tag Benson is looking for a lost packhorse when he finds the body of a man in the grassland. His trail leads him to the dead man's widow, who is very reserved and says she doesn't need any help. When his trail takes him to a neighboring ranch, he meets a hardcase who tells him to watch where he is going. Benson's search for the lost horse leads him next to an eccentric sheep queen and from there to a box canyon in a maze of buttes. He crosses paths again with the deadly ranch hand and then has to settle things at the ranch itself before he meets with the dead man's widow one more time.

A Jimmy Clevis Novel Jimmy Clevis is out of work and needs some money. So when an old man named Tull asks him to do a quick job for him, Clevis agrees. All Clevis has to do is head south to Paloma Springs to find Tull's son. Sounds like easy money, right? Wrong. Clevis isn't just riding into Paloma Springs-he's riding straight into a tangled net of lies, stealing, blackmail, hidden identities . . . and murder.

A stranger named Dunbar comes to the town of Winsome, on the plains of Wyoming, in the 1890's. Is Dunbar a range detective? Some kind of troublemaker? Or just a drifter? The cowboys get to resenting him, and some are unhappy to find him developing an acquaintance with the wife of the man who plans to change the plains by developing a dam and reservoir near the town.

Dunbar, working on a ranch in the Niobrara country in Wyoming, connects the death of a hardscrabble homesteader with the death of an old horse trader some fifteen years earlier. As Dunbar goes to work on a corral project in town and then on fall roundup, more murders take place. People who know too much are being silenced. An old woman named Verona tells of an ancient crime on Old Woman Creek, where a sheepherder was killed and his partner escaped. Dunbar brings forth the witnesses, and a showdown erupts, with Dunbar bringing justice to the Niobrara country.

When Jim Fontaine settles on a piece of land near the town of Redwillow, he ends up dealing with the murder of a saloon girl, the saloon girl's secret sister, a mysterious trespasser on his land, and the disappearance of a woman in town.

"Double Deceit" by John D. Nesbitt A man named Dunbar comes to Temple Basin where he goes to work for an old rancher who is laid up with a broken leg. The ranchers granddaughter tells the story. After one man turns up dead and another man is known to have gone missing, it becomes known that Dunbar has come on a mission to find a killer and bring him to justice. "Scarecrows" by Jim Jones Tommy Stallings hears his aunt and uncle in Texas are in trouble. He and his cousin, Rusty, leave the New Mexico Territory and head east. Cattle rustlers are terrorizing small ranchers in the Texas Panhandle and his Aunt Martha insists they look like "scarecrows" because of the canvas bags they wear to hide their faces. Tommy and Rusty join forces with Bill Slaughter, agent for the Stock-Raisers Association of North-West Texas, to investigate the rash of crimes. "Cold the Bitter Heart" by Phil Mills, Jr. A child's personality often mirrors that of a parent. Could it be Catherine Baxter was hiding behind a façade of fake innocence? Although Jake Summers would follow a trail littered with suspects had he missed the most obvious one and in the end did he really know the truth? "Wind in His Face" by Larry D. Sweazy Scrap Elliot, a veteran Texas Ranger of the original Frontier Battalion is on an important courier mission when he encounters an old flame in Waco, Texas. When the woman's husband dies in front of Scrap, the old flame disappears. That sets Scrap on a mission to find the woman and prove to the local sheriff that he was nothing more than an innocent bystander, not a cold-blooded killer"-- Provided by publisher

A stranger in town gets caught up in a mystery involving his former boss, a dead man, and a woman who disappeared twenty years before.

In 1890s Wyoming, seventeen-year-old Alden Clare assumes the responsibility of earning enough money to buy back his family's foreclosed land, taking care of his older brother's family, and helping the attractive daughter of a homesteader who is being harassed by ruffians.

"An aspiring Ohio transplant's dream of owning his own spread in turn-of-the-century Wyoming is put on hold due to a series of inconvenient murders. Earl Miner, who owns the Pick, makes no bones about insisting that every man who works for him file a claim to 160 acres under the Homestead Act and then sell it to him so he won't be troubled by competing ranchers in the Decker Basin. As soon as cowpuncher Reese Hartley bridles at that arrangement, foreman Dick Prentiss gives him his walking papers, and Hartley packs his gear. Lacking any particular plan or destination, Hartley wanders off, encountering what seems to be virtually every woman in town: Pick hand Ben Stillwell's sweetheart, Bess Ackerman, niece of grain broker Mike Ackerman; Muriel Dulse, a grass widow who also dreams of owning a place despite the tight rein Doyle Treece and the Hudson family, the cousins with whom she lives, keep on her; and Nancy Wisner, a young and flirtatious cousin of the Hudsons. As Nesbitt (Dusk Along the Niobrara, 2019, etc.) shows, however, his most fraught encounters are with aggressive local men who challenge his plan to secure his own land, get physical with him, and invite him to get out of town. While Hartley, who's a good deal less confrontational than either his adversaries or most Western heroes, is still pondering what to do next, Ben Stillwell vanishes and then turns up choked to death, followed by Nancy Wisner. When Treece accuses Blue, a mysterious newcomer to the community, of killing Nancy, blacksmith/marshal Jock Mosby arrests and jails him, but Hartley doesn't think that's the end of the story, and of course he's right. The slight mystery offers a handy peg for Nesbitt's latest valentine to the Wyoming frontier he clearly loves"-- Provided by publisher

If you have grown weary of SEX and VIOLENCE-- If you feel you have overdosed with accounts of TAWDRY LUST, POLITICAL CORRUPTION, and BRUTAL MURDERS-- Try a refreshing change. Sip from the cup of comedy, parody, and satire, laced now and then with poetry and song, topped with a dollop of pristine ROMANCE. Yes, gentle reader, you may fortify yourself against the VILE DEGRADATION and CRUEL INJUSTICES of the modern age by sampling from the medicinal tonic of the ADVENTURES OF THE RAMROD RIDER!