Book picks similar to
Payback At Morning Peak-A Novel Of The American West by Gene Hackman
western
fiction
westerns
first-reads
When Calls the Heart
Janette Oke - 1983
Yet, despite the constant hardships, she loves the children in her care. Determined to do the best job she can and fighting to survive the harsh land, Elizabeth is surprised to find her heart softening towards a certain member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Book 1 of the bestselling Canadian West series.
The Moon, the Stars, and Madame Burova
Ruth Hogan - 2021
She and her trusty pack of Tarot cards have seen the lovers and the liars, the angels and the devils, the dreamers and the fools. Now, after a lifetime of keeping other people's secrets, Madam Burova is ready to have a little piece of life for herself. But she still has one last thing to do--to fulfill a promise made in the 1970s, when she and her girlfriends were carefree, with their whole lives still before them.In London, it is time for another woman to make a fresh start. Billie has lost her university job, her marriage, and her place in the world when a sudden and unlikely discovery leaves her very identity in question. Determined to find answers, she must follow a trail...which leads to Brighton, the pier, and directly to Madame Burova's door.In a story spanning over fifty years, Ruth Hogan has conjured a magical world of 1970s holiday camps and seaside entertainers, eccentrics, heroes and villains, the lost and the found. Young people will make careless choices which echo down the years....but it's never too late to put things right.
The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up
Jacob M. Appel - 2012
But when his refusal to stand for the national anthem at a baseball game causes a major media incident, he is thrown into a world of pushy patriots, preachers, and press. And it's not going to get any easier when he refuses to apologize. A hilarious bullet into the heart of modern America, this novel mixes the literary sensibilities of Jonathan Franzen with the raucous satire of D.B.C. Pierre, and was the recipient of the Dundee International Book Prize.
Texas Blood Feud
Dusty Richards - 2009
Three generations who paid in blood and treasure. Children carried off by Comanche. A brother lost to war. Lives shattered. Chet Byrnes was trying to hold the ranch together through one more winter for one more cattle drive when he hanged three horse thieves this side of the Red River - and a blood feud erupted...A family wants revenge - no matter how just the hangings were. From attacks on the Byrnes clan to the killing of livestock, the feud leads to one vicious murder - and then another. But amidst the violence and pain, a man who has seen his youth slip by is about to get one last chance at life and love...If only Chet can end the war he started...If only he can survive this land and the killers who want him dead - at any price...
The Far Empty
J. Todd Scott - 2016
Seventeen-year-old Caleb Ross is adrift in the wake of the sudden disappearance of his mother more than a year ago, and is struggling to find his way out of the small Texas border town of Murfee. Chris Cherry is a newly minted sheriff’s deputy, a high school football hero who has reluctantly returned to his hometown. When skeletal remains are discovered in the surrounding badlands, the two are inexorably drawn together as their efforts to uncover Murfee’s darkest secrets lead them to the same terrifying suspect: Caleb’s father and Chris’s boss, the charismatic and feared Sheriff Standford “Judge” Ross. Dark, elegiac, and violent, The Far Empty is a modern Western, a story of loss and escape set along the sharp edge of the Texas border. Told by a longtime federal agent who knows the region, it’s a debut novel you won’t soon forget.
Only His
Elizabeth Lowell - 1991
But she fears this stranger who burns to avenge the wrongs of treacherous men. For Caleb is as wild and unpredictable as the uncivilized land he loves. Yet, though she challenges him at every turn, the spirited southern lady knows this proud, enigmatic loner is her destiny. And no matter what peril awaits, they must face it together -- for Willow has become a fever in Caleb′s blood ... awakening a need so fierce that he would defeat the devil himself to possess her.
The Lady and the Mountain Man
Misty M. Beller - 2014
Through God’s leading, she finds herself accepting a newspaper marriage proposal from a God-fearing young rancher in the Montana Territory. But when Leah arrives at the mountain ranch, she learns her intended husband was killed by a grizzly, leaving behind a bitter older brother and a spunky younger sister.Gideon Bryant has lost too many people to the wild elements of these mountains—his parents, his wife, and now his brother. His love for this untamed country will never die, but he’s determined not to open his heart to another person, especially this beautiful Easterner who shows up on their doorstep.But when an accident forces Leah to stay at the ranch for several months, can Gideon guard himself from a love he doesn’t want? Will Leah find God’s true direction for her life?
Death Rattle
Sean Lynch - 2019
. . THE LEGEND BEGINS In 1863, a teenaged boy fled his home in Atherton, Missouri, to escape the power-hungry men who murdered his father and stole his family's land. He joined the Confederacy under an assumed name and led guerilla raids in the Civil War. Then came a decade as a Texas Ranger. Now, after ten blood-soaked years, he is finally coming home. Finally using his real name. And finally getting revenge against the cold-hearted devils who destroyed his family and his life . . .This is the story of Samuel Pritchard. Now a small town sheriff with a long history of violence, a deep sense of honor, and wild streak of justice as dangerous as the guns that made him famous . . ."A riveting thriller that bristles with hard-boiled authenticity." --bestselling author Mark Greaney on Thy Partner's Wife "Sean Lynch spins a tale that is fast, fun and realistic." --Bestselling author James O. Born on Like Hell
Outlawed
Anna North - 2021
She loves her broad-shouldered, bashful husband and her job as an apprentice midwife.But her luck will not last. It is every woman's duty to have a child, to replace those that were lost in the Great Flu. And after a year of marriage and no pregnancy, in a town where barren women are hanged as witches, Ada's survival depends on leaving behind everything she knows.She joins up with the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang. Its leader, a charismatic preacher-turned-robber known to all as The Kid, wants to create a safe haven for women outcast from society. But to make this dream a reality, the Gang hatches a treacherous plan. And Ada must decide whether she's willing to risk her life for the possibility of a new kind of future for them all.
Wind River
James Reasoner - 1994
After buffalo hunter and former army scout Cole Tyler arrives in Wind River, a primitive outpost in the wild Wyoming Territory, he is unwittingly drawn into taking the unwelcome and dangerous job of town marshal. Marshal Cole Tyler finds himself facing a ruthless killer as Wind River becomes a town with its own brand of justice.
A Hanging at Cinder Bottom
Glenn Taylor - 2015
Halley’s Comet has just signaled the end of the world, and Jack Johnson has knocked out the “Great White Hope,” Jim Jeffries. Keystone, West Virginia, is the region’s biggest boomtown, and on a rainy Sunday morning in August, its townspeople are gathered in a red-light district known as Cinder Bottom to witness the first public hanging in over a decade. Abe Baach and Goldie Toothman are at the gallows, awaiting their execution. He’s Keystone’s most famous poker player; she’s the madam of its most infamous brothel. Abe split town seven years prior under suspicion of armed robbery and murder, and has been playing cards up and down the coast, hustling under a variety of pseudonyms, ever since. But when he returns to Keystone to reunite with Goldie and to set the past right, he finds a brother dead and his father’s saloon in shambles—and suspects the same men might be responsible for both. Only then, in facing his family’s past, does the real swindle begin.Glenn Taylor, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, has a unique voice that breathes life into history and a prose style that snaps with lyricism and comedy.
Into the Wilderness
Sara Donati - 1998
Elizabeth Middleton leaves her comfortable English estate to join her family in a remote New York mountain village. It is a place unlike any she has ever experienced. And she meets a man unlike any she has ever encountered - a white man dressed like a Native American, Nathanial Booner, known to the Mohawk people as Between-Two-Lives. Determined to provide schooling for all the children of the village, she soons finds herself locked in conflict with the local slave owners as well as her own family. Interweaving the fate of the Mohawk Nation with the destiny of two lovers, Sara Donati's compelling novel creates a complex, profound, passionate portrait of an emerging America.
The Big Sky
A.B. Guthrie Jr. - 1947
B. Guthrie Jr.'s epic adventure novels set in the American West. Here he introduces Boone Caudill, Jim Deakins, and Dick Summers: traveling the Missouri River from St. Louis to the Rockies, these frontiersmen live as trappers, traders, guides, and explorers. The story centers on Caudill, a young Kentuckian driven by a raging hunger for life and a longing for the blue sky and brown earth of big, wild places. Caught up in the freedom and savagery of the wilderness, Caudill becomes an untamed mountain man, whom only the beautiful daughter of a Blackfoot chief dares to love.
The Lost Jewels
Kirsty Manning - 2020
When respected American jewelry historian, Kate Kirby, receives a call about the Cheapside jewels, she knows she’s on the brink of the experience of a lifetime. But the trip to London forces Kate to explore secrets that have long been buried by her own family. Back in Boston, Kate has uncovered a series of sketches in her great-grandmother’s papers linking her suffragette great-grandmother Essie to the Cheapside collection. Could these sketches hold the key to Essie’s secret life in Edwardian London? In the summer of 1912, impoverished Irish immigrant Essie Murphy happens to be visiting her brother when a workman’s pickaxe strikes through the floor of an old tenement house in Cheapside, near St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The workmen uncover a stash of treasure—from Ottoman pendants to Elizabethan and Jacobean gems—and then the finds disappear again! Could these jewels—one in particular—change the fortunes of Essie and her sisters? Together with photographer Marcus Holt, Kate Kirby chases the history of the Cheapside gems and jewels, especially the story of a small diamond champlevé enamel ring. Soon, everything Kate believes about her family, gemology, and herself will be threatened. Based on a fascinating true story, The Lost Jewels is a riveting historical fiction novel that will captivate readers from the beginning to the unforgettable, surprising end.
The Cowboy and the Cossack
Clair Huffaker - 1973
Assigned to accompany them is a band of Cossacks, Russia’s elite horsemen and warriors. From the first day, distrust between the two groups disrupts the cattle drive. But as they overcome hardships and trials along the trail, a deep understanding and mutual respect develops between the men in both groups.