Wayne D. Overholser, who passed away in 1996, was a charter member of the Western Writers of America and won a Spur Award the first year they were given out, in 1953, as Lee Leighton. He would go on to win two more Spurs and be awarded the Saddleman Award for lifetime achievement in 1989. Five Star has released BEYOND THE LAW, a duo of novels that includes SHADOW OF A LOBO, introducing a new audience to Overholser’s writing.
In SHADOW, he tackles a familiar Western novel about the abuse of power in a small town, but adds some nice twists. Cliff Jenson always wanted to be a rancher, but instead, started a mercantile. There are two mercantile stores in town, so there’s competition, and a toll road that runs in and out of the valley. When a new banker comes to town and gives Jenson the choice to be a rancher or close the store, Jenson decides to do whatever it takes to keep his store, especially after the toll road owner disappears, and supplies become even harder to come by.
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In the 1980s, Guinness listed Lauran Paine as the most prolific writer in the world. Whether that is a good thing or not is up to the reader to decide. But when most people think of Western writers of the early generation, Paine is probably not the first name to come to one’s mind. he started writing short stories for the pulps and slick magazines in the ’30s and ’40s, then graduated to novels. The re-release of Paine’s long list of publications may change that.
IRON MARSHAL is billed as a duo, a standard format from Five Star. Its first novel, LOST VALLEY, tackles a generational ranch tale with all of the expected characters and tropes. A good-natured sheriff who must defend a homesteader on the land that is completely owned by the Hyland family, but hard to prove. Growth and progress are the evils here, fought by men determined to stay on land they believe is theirs, and the conclusion will come as no surprise.
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Rancher Dan Sanson had experienced a lot of tragedy; the death of his wife and a good chunk of his herd had died the summer before to a mysterious sickness, but he was determined to continue on and make go of the ranch. Bad thing for Sanson is that he owned the water rights in between two powerful ranches — and it appears, at the beginning of Terrell L. Bowers’ THE SWITCHBACK TRAIL, to have cost him his life.
On top of Sanson’s murder, add in an arranged marriage between the two ranches, both in financial trouble, a ranch hand who may be more or less than he pretends, a kidnapping for ransom, and a pair of despicable hired guns, and you have a familiar, traditional Western that, in the end, is a highly entertaining read.
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Phil Dunlap’s AMBUSH CREEK reads like a return to the Golden Age of Western fiction. His straightforward writing style is reminiscent of Lauran Paine or Luke Short. The story starts in Cochise, Arizona Territory, in 1880. The local sheriff, John Henry Stevens, encounters three bounty hunters, who look like they’ve fallen on the bad side of the coin.
The three leave town, but not before raising the sheriff’s suspicions about their ultimate destination and purpose. When U.S. Marshal Piedmont Kelly arrives in Cochise, the sheriff asks him to check up on the bounty hunters. What Kelly finds begins the start of a hunt that takes the marshal back to Desert Belle, the location of Dunlap’s first novel, THE DEATH OF DESERT BELLE, where Kelly nearly lost his life. Marshal Kelly is aided by Spotted Dog, a Chiricahua Apache and tracker, whose life he once saved.
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