Richard S. Wheeler

Author Information
Richard S. Wheeler's Latest Book

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  • Bibliography:
    81 Books (5 Series)
  • First Book:
    January 1978
  • Latest Book:
    April 2018
  • Author Rating:
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Full Series List in Order

A Cletus Parr Mystery

Big Apple (Nov-2004)
Bad Apple (Jun-2009)

A Comstock Novel

Sun Mountain (May-1999)

The Rocky Mountain Company

The Rocky Mountain Company (Mar-1991)
Fort Dance (Nov-1991)
Cheyenne Winter (Jan-1992)

Sam Flint

1 - Flint's Gift (Jun-1997)
2 - Flint's Truth (May-1998)
3 - Flint's Honor (Jul-1999)

Skye's West

1 - Sun River (Jul-1989)
2 - Bannack (Oct-1989)
3 - The Far Tribes (Feb-1990)
4 - Yellowstone (Oct-1990)
5 - Bitterroot (Aug-1991)
6 - Sundance (Oct-1992)
7 - Wind River (Sep-1993)
8 - Santa Fe (Nov-1994)
9 - Rendezvous (Jun-1997)
10 - Dark Passage (Nov-1998)
11 - Going Home (Dec-2000)
12 - Downriver (Dec-2001)
13 - The Deliverance (Mar-2003)
14 - The Fire Arrow (May-2006)
15 - The Canyon of Bones (Apr-2007)
16 - Virgin River (Mar-2008)
17 - North Star (Mar-2009)
18 - The Owl Hunt (Dec-2010)
19 - The First Dance (Jul-2011)

Multi-Author Series List

Rivers West

9 - The Two Medicine River (Apr-1993)

Book List in Order: 81 titles

  • Bushwack

    A Spur Award-winning Author -- A transplanted Easterner, Linda Van Pelt found herself alone in a desolate country when her husband died. She turned for help to her neighbor, a horse trainer named Canada Parker. After burying Linda?s husband, Canada b...

  • Beneath the Blue Mountain

    Don Ignacio Olivera is determined to protect the vast lands his family has held for more than a century from encroachers like Nathaniel Hapgood, even if he must use his own private army of pistoleros to enforce his claims....

  • Winter Grass

  • Sam Hook

    Sheriff Oglesby's idea of doing a good job is doing nothing to upset the voters and he is successful until he tangles with Sam Hook, an independent, courageous old man who would fight to the death for what was right...

  • Richard Lamb

    He was a peace-loving man forced to fight for his kin and his rights against the U. S. Army. In the forty years since Richard Lamb had come to Montana, he had built a thriving trading post where he lived with his Blackfoot Indian wife, their children...

  • Dodging Red Cloud

    A debut collection of fresh and offbeat short stories probes the slightly askew world of a grade school teacher in love with a student's pregnant mother; an aging, one-armed umpire; a jazz drummer; and others...

  • Stop

  • Fool's Coach

  • Sun River

    Skye's West - 1

    They call him Mister Skye He's big, he's tough, and he knows the West as few others do the trails, the people, the weather - everything from which a tenderfoot needs to be protected. Skye's biggest problem is protecting people from themselves. Mister...



  • Bannack

    Skye's West - 2

    If Mister Skye had not wanted the new Henry repeating rifle so badly, he would have thought more than twice about leading this particular group of pilgrims from Ft. Laramie into the Idaho territory. There was Alvah Riddle, marriage broker, leading...

  • The Far Tribes

    Skye's West - 3



    There are many legends of great mountain men, hunters and trappers who manage to survive on their own in the harsh landscapes and forests of the West. The frontier is full of adversity, from blood-hungry natives to the vicious beasts of th...

  • Where the River Runs

  • Incident at Fort Keogh

    BARELY ALIVE, HE HAD A BULLET IN HIS SKULL, AND A STORY TWICE AS STRANGE.

    When Mordecai Sapp turned up with a bullet wound in his head at the doorstep of lawman and medical man Santiago Toole, he only wanted doctoring. But it didn't take Toole...

  • Yellowstone

    Skye's West - 4



    The saga of Mr. Skye continues when he heads a wagon train through the Great Plains and into trouble. But what else could he expect with this group of misfits, prostitutes, gamblers, runaways, and mail-order brides?

    ...

  • Montana Hitch

    From the moment Abner Dent spotted Eve in a Maiden dance hall, he knew he wanted her for his wife. He promised her everything and kept his word. He built her the finest white house in Judith basin and ordered the finest furnishings. Haviland bone chi...

  • The Final Tally

    WHAT GUILTY SECRETS LAY COVERED IN BLOOD AND BULLETS?

    This was no ordinary cattle drive through Sheriff Santiago Toole's Miles City in the Montana Territory. Three cowboys in the outfit had already stopped bullets, and the boss man Hermes Brag...

  • The Rocky Mountain Company

    The Rocky Mountain Company

    In 1841, St Louis businessman Guy Strauss had sent his hopes, his son, and his money up the Missouri River to the Yellowstone, where he was opening a trading post under the command of a wild mountain man named Broken Leg Fitzhugh. Strauss knew the pl...

  • Deuces and Ladies Wild

    IN THIS MURDEROUS GAME THERE WOULD BE NO SPORTING LOSERS - ONLY DEAD ONES.

    Jubal Peach was the gambling king of Miles City, but that wasn't enough for him. He wanted to own it all, and that included Miles City Kate's thriving saloon.

    Sh...

  • Bitterroot

    Skye's West - 5




    Barnaby Skye, along with his wives, agrees to take a Quaker missionary, Dr.William Penn Sitgreaves, his wife Abigail who accompanies him reluctantly, and his party, to Owen's Fort in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana, where the Qua...



  • Fort Dance

    The Rocky Mountain Company

  • Cheyenne Winter

    The Rocky Mountain Company

    In 1841, St. Louis businessman Guy Strauss had sent his hopes, his son, and his money up the Missouri River to the Yellowstone, where he was opening a trading post under the command of a wild mountain man named Broken Leg Fitzhugh. Strauss knew the p...

  • Sundance

    Skye's West - 6



    Along the Oregon Trail, a war party of Lakota Sioux rob Con Brann of all that he holds dear--his horses and, more devastatingly his lovely daughter Hester.  Only Mister Skye, guide and scout to the Great Plains, can help Brann now.
     
    ...

  • The Two Medicine River

    Rivers West - 9

    RIVERS WEST Discover one of the most thrilling frontier series of our time...tales of mountain men and intrepid women, pioneer families and Native American warriors. Discover North America in all its awesome splendor. THE TWO MEDICINE RIVER Down...

  • Wind River

    Skye's West - 7

    Barnaby Skye, the former Royal Navy Captain turned trapper has been offered a lucrative proposal from the US Government. His intimate relations with many Indian tribes, and his marriages to their women, have landed him a job as scout and translator ...

  • Badlands

    In the Badlands on an expedition to study early man and prehistoric fossils, Candace is unaware that the men accompanying her have plans to steal treasures and holy relics from and deface the sacred places of the Sioux Nation...

  • Cashbox

    From high-stakes speculators to hardened miners to sultry women in search of adventure, the 1880s silver-mining town of Cashbox attracts a range of characters looking to make it big on the frontier. Reprint....

  • Santa Fe

    Skye's West - 8

    A tawdry travelling medicine show is the last place you'd expect to find frontier scout Barnaby Skye and his two wives, But he's been hired to guide the caravan across the dangerous Sante Fe Trail. And when Skye starts a job, he follows through.

  • Goldfield

    In the wake of an early twentieth-century gold mine discovery in southwestern Nevada, hordes of fortune-seekers rush to Goldfield, including a hard-working prospector, a horse trader, a geology professor, and a newspaper editor. Reprint. AB. K. PW. ...

  • Sierra

    The discovery of gold in the Sierras triggered the greatest migration in United States history, the gold rush of 1849. In this sweeping story of the rush to California by land and by sea, four young people discover what gold fever can do to a person'...



  • Second Lives


    Denver, Colorado, as wildly spectacular a place as the Gilded Age West ever produced, is the setting for Second Lives by master storyteller Richard S. Wheeler.

    Into this Rocky Mountain crossroads own in the 1880s streamed all manner of men...

  • Flint's Gift

    Sam Flint - 1


    It is 1877. All over the American West, frontier towns have sprung up, drawing people in search of new beginnings after the Civil War. Among these towns, Payday is a paradise of rolling meadows and balmy skies, with a quiet population of ranchers...

  • Rendezvous

    Skye's West - 9

    Barnaby Skye, a pressed seaman in the Royal Navy, jumps ship at Fort Vancouver in 1826 with little more than the clothes on his back and a belaying pin for a weapon. Fighting for life, starving, hiding from his pursuers--the Hudson's Bay Company and...

  • The Buffalo Commons


    The High Plains of eastern Montana are the setting for this riveting contemporary novel about good people warring over their ideals. The battle is between those who hope to restore the vast Western prairie lands to their former grandeur, where bu...

  • Flint's Truth

    Sam Flint - 2


    Driving his wagonload of printing equipment into Oro Blanco, site of the richest gold strike in the New Mexico Territory, journeymen editor Sam Flint decides his newest weekly newspaper will be the Oro Blanco Nugget. But, as he's learned the hard...

  • Dark Passage

    Skye's West - 10

    It is 1831 and Barnaby Skye, a deserter from the British Royal Navy and now a seasoned trapper in the Rocky Mountains, accompanies his Crow wife, Mary Quill Woman--whom he calls "Victoria"--to her village on the Yellowstone River. Victoria--unhappy w...

  • The Fate

    WOMEN AND GOLD -- NOW THAT'S WORTH KILLING FOR When Drogovich's gold was stolen and his daughter kidnapped in a daring train robbery, the ruthless gold king had big reasons and plenty of sharpshooters to make sure the case got solved pronto. Bu...

  • Sun Mountain

    A Comstock Novel

    "There had never been a place like the Comstock or a city like Virginia or a gathering of brilliant men such as those who assembled there." So writes Henry Stoddard in Richard Wheeler's unforgettable novel-as-memoir of Virginia City, the most spectac...

  • Flint's Honor

    Sam Flint - 3

    Sam Flint, a committed Old West journalist, returns with a dangerous attempt to start an honest newspaper as competition for the corrupt and powerful Silver City Democrat in the newly formed state of Colorado. Reprint....

  • Aftershocks

    A chronicle of the 1906 earthquake that devastated San Francisco presents the disaster through the eyes of the people of the city, including a driven architect, a photographer who records the damage, a missionary, and others. Reprint....



  • Masterson


    In 1919, on the eve of Prohibition, Bat Masterson, legendary gunfighter and a sports columnist in New York for two decades, is ill and thinking of his youth as a frontier lawman. He is bothered by the legendry that has dogged his footsteps, and o...

  • The Witness

    Amos Burch is the most charitable man in Paradise, Colorado. As owner of the bank, several businesses, and many of the outlying ranches, he's also the richest. Paradise owes Burch its very existence, so when his bookkeeper, Daniel Knott, discovers hi...

  • Going Home

    Skye's West - 11

    It is 1832, six years after he deserted the Royal Navy, when Barnaby Skye has a chance to return to England to clear his name and take up employment with the Hudson's Bay Company. But "Mister Skye," as he insists on being called, is as much a magnet ...

  • Restitution

    A pillar of of the community of Cottonwood, Utah, Truman Jackson and his family have hidden their outlaw background for seventeen years, until Truman, determined to reconcile himself with his past, decides to reveal the truth, even if it turns everyo...

  • Tales of the American West

    This deluxe, paper-over-board hardcover is a one-of-a-kind collection-fully endorsed and supported by the Western Writers of America-featuring the finest works of classic and contemporary western fiction from Spur Award-winners....

    Tales of t...

  • The Fields of Eden

    In the mid-1840s, the trails west from the Missouri frontier were clogged with pioneers searching for a new life in a remote land they thought was another Eden.

    In The Fields of Eden Richard S. Wheeler follows the lives of several settlers wh...

  • Drum's Ring

    There's something rotten about Opportunity, Kansas. The Texas drovers bringing herds to the railroad there hate the place. The town manages to bilk and cheat them. It's gotten so bad that the Texans are threatening to tear the town apart. Angie Drum,...

  • Downriver

    Skye's West - 12

    Barnaby Skye, seaman-deserter from the Royal Navy, Rocky Mountain trapper, and frontiersman extraordinaire, brings his Crow Indian wife, Many Quill Woman (whom Skye calls "Victoria"), to the trappers' rendezvous on the Popo Agie River of Wyoming in t...

  • Eclipse

    Lewis and Clark: forever paired for their epochal first crossing of the continent in 1804-1806, darlings of the young republic, and the pride of Thomas Jefferson because they made his dream of a nation between two oceans come true.Lewis and Clark: tw...

  • The Deliverance

    Skye's West - 13

    In this newest of Richard Wheeler's Barnaby Skye chronicles, the earthy deserter from the Royal Navy, now a trapper, guide, and magnet for adventure, collects his Crow Indian wife Many Quills Woman (or "Victoria" as he calls her) and drif...



  • Cutthroat Gulch

    Old sheriff Blue Smith is looking forward to retirement, and happy days fishing. Bu when he discovers the body of a stranger at his favorite fishing hole, everything changes. The old sheriff discovers that the killer is really fishing for the sheriff...

  • The Exile

    Thomas Francis Meagher -- " Meagher of the Sword" -- was already an Irish revolutionary legend when he arrived in New York in 1851. He studied law, married a wealthy New York woman, engaged in Tammany politics, and commanded the Irish Brigade at A...

  • The Bounty Trail

    When The West's Wiliest Grifter Meets His Match... Some know him as the Colonel. Some know him as the Most Reverend Archbishop Raines. But from California to Colorado, everyone who meets C.P. Raines thinks he's the most charming, daring, and greed...

  • Vengeance Valley

    Hard Luck Yancey earned his moniker the hard way: getting swindled out of the fortune he earned on a high, windy ridge in the San Juan Mountains. But losing a silver mine and the town he founded hasn't stopped him. Now, he's made an astounding discov...

  • Big Apple

    A Cletus Parr Mystery

    Big Apple, a champion cutting horse, is assassinated on the eve of a major cutting horse competition. Rex Pattee, the owner, calls livestock detective Cletus Parr, wanting answers. Parr thinks maybe it is an insurance scam, and confronts Pattee. But ...

  • An Obituary for Major Reno

    Marcus Reno is a pariah, a controversial figure accused of being responsible for the worst disaster ever to befall the army of the United States. Thirteen years past, he was one of George Armstrong Custer’s senior officers when Custer and over 200 ...

  • Trouble in Tombstone



    Here are the life and times of Wyatt Earp--sheriff, gambler, lover, friend, and one of the most memorable personalities of the Old West. Novelist Richard Wheeler lets the old man look back upon his checkered life, and in the process brings E...

  • Seven Miles to Sundown

    A Mother Lode Of Trouble Rio Blanco is a dying town, until a snakebit prospector collapses in the street, clutching a chunk of gold and gasping last words about the Lost Doubloon mine. Word spreads like wildfire, and a cutthroat contest to find the ...

  • Fire in the Hole

    In Skeleton Gulch, Brave Men Disappear... ...where widows are turned into whores, and suckers end up dead in rat-infested alleys. Dink Drago's specialty is getting rid of vermin, and now the Rocky Mountain Detective Agency has sent him to Skeleton G...

  • From Hell to Midnight

    He Came To Unearth A Buried Treasure... In a tweed coat and pith helmet, Hannibal Jones stands out from the hardscrabble crowd on the Nevada frontier. But the legendary mining geologist fears no man, dead or alive--and that includes the ghost belie...

  • The Fire Arrow

    Skye's West - 14

    Barnaby Skye, the most durable and unforgettable character in modern Western fiction, returns in this harrowing tale of survival from his early years in the Rockies. In the midst of a brutal winter, Skye's beloved Crow Indian wife, Victoria, is cr...

  • The Honorable Cody

    During his lifetime, Buffalo Bill Cody was the best-known person on earth. Dime novelists of the time had so embroidered his history that even Buffalo Bill himself couldn't keep it straight. His publicist John Burke thought he had invented Cody, but ...

  • The Canyon of Bones

    Skye's West - 15

    With the trapping trade on the decline, mountain man Barnaby Skye takes work as a guide, leading a wealthy Englishman, Graves Duplessis Mercer and two companions on an exploration of the Yellowstone and Missouri River valleys. Mercer is a peculiar em...

  • Virgin River

    Skye's West - 16

    This is the sixteenth novel in Richard S. Wheeler's long-running series about Barnaby Skye, the British seaman who carves out an amazing life for himself in the North American Wilderness, along with his wives and his ugly, cantankerous horse, Jawbone...

  • North Star

    Skye's West - 17

    There is a season for all things. . . For Barnaby Skye, legendary guide and man of the borders, it is time to start a new life. For Skye's younger wife, the beautiful Shoshone woman he calls Mary, it is time to find the beloved son she has not seen i...

  • Bad Apple

    A Cletus Parr Mystery

    Who assassinated the world's greatest cutting horse, Bad Apple--and why? Livestock detective Cletus Parr would like some answers. Bad Apple's owner, Rex Pattee, hires Parr to find out, and soon Parr is talking to millionaire horsemen, livestock broke...

  • Snowbound

    In this powerful biographical novel, Richard Wheeler--winner of the Owen Wister Lifetime Achievement Award and five Spur Awards--tells the amazing tale of the American explorer and hero, John Fremont, and his attempt to find a railway route to the we...

  • Yancey's Jackpot

    Hard Luck Yancey finds bonanza gold directly beneath the grounds of a mining town hospital run by nuns. Soon, every mining mogul in the camp is trying to push the sisters off their property and get at the rich veins of gold. This would force the sist...

  • The Owl Hunt

    Skye's West - 18

    The latest in the long-running tale of the beloved mountain man, Barnaby Skye, occurs early in the history of the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, where Skye's mixed-blood son, Dirk, teaches school. A total eclipse of the sun panics the Shoshones,...

  • The First Dance

    Skye's West - 19

    The First Dance takes beloved mountain man Barnaby Skye's family to its third generation in North America. Miles City, Montana. 1885. Barnaby Skye's mixed-blood son, Dirk, has just married a beautiful Metis girl, Therese. But Dirk's position as a ...

  • The Richest Hill on Earth

    In this captivating historical novel, six-time Spur Award winner Richard S. Wheeler turns his storyteller's eye to a clash of towering ambitions in the American West, when the Copper Kings of Butte, Montana, wrestled each other for control of both th...

  • Mugs Birdsong's Crime Academy

    After being reformed for five years in the Wyoming pen, the celebrated criminal Mugs Birdsong decides to found a crime academy that will instruct lawmen on the ways of means of lawlessness. He sets up shop in an abandoned orphanage in Rock Springs, a...

  • Easy Street

    Jay Warren, Harvard, 1876, discovers that his father, Tecumseh, has left him some cash and a rail ticket to Cheyenne, Wyoming. Also a note that says the West is a good place to make something of himself. Tecumseh is a self-made shipping magnate, and ...

  • Anything Goes

    Anything Goes: the enchanting story of a vaudeville troupe that makes its way to Western mining towns, from renowned master of the Western novel, Richard S. Wheeler. The cowboys, gold miners, outlaws, gunmen, prostitutes, and marshals who populate...

  • Easy Pickings

    A widow must defend herself and her property from greedy townsfolk in Easy Pickings, a new tale from renowned master of the Western novel, Richard S. Wheeler Life hasn't always been easy for March and Kermit McPhee, but things are looking up. Marc...

  • Brass in the Desert

    Gladstone Brass found out how to make his livelihood during the thirty years he prospected the arid wastes of the Nevada desert. He pried ore out of the few little deposits he discovered, then went town which he hated only long enough to trade his bi...

  • Anything Goes and the Richest Hill on Earth

    Travelling performers struggle to impress rowdy western towns in Anything Goes, and ambitions clash as Montana miners fight for control of The Richest Hill on Earth; two novels from six-time Spur Award winner Richard S. Wheeler. Anything Goes The...

  • Heroes

    In the early 2000s, Richard S. Wheeler, author of more than 70 titles, proposed a nontraditional and risky series to an editor. While the traditional western depicts courage at arms or in combat, these books would depict moral or ethical courage. Whe...

  • The Business of Dying

    Collected here for the first time are all the Western short stories of Richard S. Wheeler, winner of four Spur Awards as well as the Owen Wister Award for his lifetime achievement in the world of Western literature by the Western Writers of America. ...

  • No Name

    There is something sinister about Throatlatch, Wyoming. When a young man with no name wanders there, in the 1880s, he finds himself in big trouble. From that moment, Throatlatch fascinates him. He doesn't know why. But he knows he is seeing pure evil...

  • Decade of Innocence

    • /
    • Buy

    This is an unforgettable, true story of real-life drama. The author describes the dreadful realities of living with an abusive alcoholic father, along with the charming aspects of growing up in a quaint neighborhood sub-culture of the 1940's and 50's...

  • The Homicidal Saint

    • / Mystery
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Award-Winning Books by Richard S. Wheeler

Drum's Ring
2002 SPUR Award -- Paperback Original
Fool's Coach
1989 SPUR Award -- Western Novel
Masterson
2000 SPUR Award -- Western Novel
Sierra
1996 SPUR Award -- Novel of the West
Vengeance Valley
2005 SPUR Award -- Paperback Original


Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Richard S. Wheeler has published 81 books.

Richard S. Wheeler does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, No Name, was published in April 2018.

The first book by Richard S. Wheeler, Bushwack, was published in January 1978.

Yes. Richard S. Wheeler has 5 series.
Author Series
Multi-Author Series
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