Bounty Hunter's Moon
A five thousand-dollar bounty was a lot of money in the New Mexico Territory of 1881. Yet that was the amount that was placed on the head of a celebrated bandit the sheriff of Tannekaw had captured for delivery to distant Clayton City. But when the sheriff himself was mysteriously murdered, it seemed that more than a few were hanging about, waiting to free the outlaw or sieze him and grab the reward for themselves. But when Shawn Starbuck is called in by the sheriff's widow to help, he finds himself drawn into a maze of treachery and death …
A Gun for Silver Rose
When Shawn Starbuck witnesses the vicious slaying of two prominent miners, an unruly crowd, gone berserk, mistakes him for the killer and drags him off to be lynched. He is saved only by the testimony of a handsome woman called Silver Rose Johnson, owner of the Lady Luck Saloon.
But Shawn's involvement gets deeper and deeper as more killings occur, and both he and Silver Rose are forced to flee for their lives …
Ray Hogan is an author who has inspired a loyal following ever since he published his first Western novel Ex-marshal in 1956. Hogan was born in Willow Springs, Missouri, where his father was town marshal. At five the Hogan family moved to Albuquerque where Ray Hogan lived in the foothills of the Sandia and Manzano mountains. His father was on the Albuquerque police force and, in later years, owned the Overland Hotel. It was while listening to his father and other old-timers tell tales from the past that Ray was inspired to recast these tales in fiction. From the beginning he did exhaustive research into the history and the people of the Old West and the walls of his study were lined with various firearms, spurs, pictures, books, and memorabilia, about all of which he could talk in dramatic detail. Among his most popular works are the series of books about Shawn Starbuck, a searcher in a quest for a lost brother, who has a clear sense of right and wrong and who is willing to stand up and be counted when it is a question of fairness or justice. His other major series is about lawman John Rye, whose reputation has earned him the sobriquet The Doomsday Marshal. ‘I've attempted to capture the courage and bravery of those men and women that lived out west and the dangers and problems they had to overcome,” Hogan once remarked. If his lawmen protagonists seem sometimes larger than life, it is because they are men of integrity, heroes who through grit, character and common sense are able to overcome the obstacles they encounter despite often overwhelming odds. This same grit of character can also be found in Hogan's heroines and, in The Vengeance of Fortuna West, Hogan wrote a gripping and totally believable account of a woman who takes up the badge and tracks the men who killed her lawman husband by ambush. No less intriguing in her way is Nellie Dupray, convicted of rustling in The Glory Trail. Above all, what is most impressive about Hogan's Western novels is the consistent quality with which each is crafted, the compelling depth of his characters, and his ability to juxtapose the complexities of human conflict into narratives always as intensely interesting as they are emotionally involving.
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