Showing results by author "William Johnstone" in All Categories

USA Today best-selling author William W. Johnstone built a reputation for crafting unmatched stories of true Western courage - a tradition J. A. Johnstone now continues. In A Rocky Mountain Christmas, Matt Jensen’s scenic trip on the Denver railway is derailed when an avalanche strikes the train. Far from an accident, its cause is a reckless band of outlaws out to free their leader. Surrounded and outgunned in a driving snowstorm, Matt must lead to safety a ragtag group of survivors that includes a senator’s sick daughter and a beautiful woman with a dark past.

Smoke Jensen is the most powerful man on the Sugarloaf frontier - and he's all that stands between a greedy group of Eastern slickers and their schemes for a criminal empire in the Rockies. When Smoke heads back to Boston with his wife, it gives his enemies the opening they'd been waiting for: to kill the mountain man and take over the West.

Ten years ago, the legendary mountain man Preacher taught a violent lesson to eastern bad man Ezra Pease when he ran the outlaw out of town. But Pease and his trail-scum are back - shooting up the Big Empty to nail Preacher’s hide to a tree. Preacher’s riding to teach Pease one final deadly lesson. But he may be too late - because Pease’s vicious dealings have fired up an all-out Indian War. Now, with hard-riding death on both sides, Preacher, along with his old friends Beartooth, Dupre and Nighthawk, are heading straight into lead-flying scalp-smashing hell!

It is the fall of 1867. Twenty-two years have passed since Tim Colter and his family were ambushed on the Oregon Trail, forcing the young boy to grow up, forge ahead, and find an unlikely ally in one-eyed mountain man Jed Reno. Now a widowed deputy, US marshal, and Civil War veteran, Colter is finally ready to remarry and settle down - until a dangerous new assignment becomes a life-or-death struggle for the soul of a town and the heart of its people....

A Rocky Mountain winter has left Breck reeling from the carnage unleashed by bloodthirsty trapper Judd Carnahan - and readying a quest for vengeance as ruthless as their prey. It gets even deadlier when Carnahan lays siege to a trading post on the Yellowstone River. He's left the owner dead and kidnapped a pretty hostage who can turn a nice profit once he puts her to work.

Smoke Jensen sat in a cave and boiled the last of his coffee. He figured he was in Idaho - somewhere south of Montpelier - but he was certain about only two things: He was cold and he was being hunted by a small army of men. Smoke knew why he was cold - it was winter. He just didn't have a clear idea of why anyone was after him.

Restless cowpoke Perley Gates wanted nothing more than to track down the grandfather who abandoned his family years ago. What he found was the crazy old sidewinder barely hanging on after a Sioux massacre. The old man's dying wish was to make things right for deserting his kin - by giving his strong-willed grandson Perley clues to the whereabouts of a buried fortune in gold. Finding his grandfather's legacy will set up his family for life. But it won't be easy.

For the greatest trapper in the country, there’s no place like the Rocky Mountains. Preacher and his son Hawk are riding the High Lonesome when the clear mountain air is split by a girl’s savage screams. A gang of ruthless trappers has kidnapped a Crow woman, but before they escape with her, Preacher and Hawk burst out of the tree line, guns spitting fire.

Cotton Pickens is feeling about as low as a man can get. Held up, robbed, and fired from his job as sheriff, things get even worse when someone murders Cotton's horse Critter. And it's all happening just as a flashy, fleshy stage company comes to town. Some folks demand the show be shut down for immorality. Some folks - Cotton included - sure enjoy the proceedings. But when a man gets stabbed to death, a bank safe gets blown up, and another county's sheriff starts imposing his will, Cotton realizes that a dastardly plot is taking over Doubtful.

When a farmer's wife is murdered, an innocent man is accused: Patrick O'Brien. The book-loving brother had shared his love of literature with the woman, but her husband claims she spurned Pat's advances and that's why he killed her. Now it looks like Patrick will swing from the gallows - especially after his lawyer is targeted, too.

On the American frontier, every gun tells a story. A boy in Texas waits for a Christmas present he chose from a Montgomery Ward catalog. The present - a brand-new lever action Winchester 1886 and a box of its big .50-caliber slugs - never makes it there. Instead the rifle is caught up in a train robbery and starts a long and violent journey of its own - from the hands of a notorious, kill-crazy outlaw to an Apache renegade to a hardscrabble rancher and beyond.

In the criminal underworld of Laramie County, Lucien Clay was king. He terrorized the locals, robbed the coffers, and ruled the place with an iron fist. Thankfully he’s behind bars now—along with a load of other lowlife scum—thanks to Laramie’s new sheriff, Buck Trammel. Unfortunately, Buck can only enforce the law while others specialize in working around it: namely, lawyers. And no lawyer is more crooked or corrupt than the belly-crawling snake Clay hired to get him out. By any means possible.

Red Ryan should've known this job would be trouble. The first stop is a ghost town and the cargo is a coffin. But things start to look a little brighter when Red and his stage guard Buttons Muldoon deliver the corpse to a ranch run by the beautiful Luna Talbot. Luna asks the boys to help them find the Lucky Cuss Gold Mine, using a map tucked inside the dead man's pocket. Red has a feeling they're playing with fire. Especially when the map leads them straight into crossfire of a ferocious range war.

The little town of No-Name, Colorado is jubilant when they strike gold there, until every no-account degenerate and desperado for hundreds of miles shows up on their doorstep. It's up to mountain Man Smoke Jensen and his over-the-hill companions to save the town's bacon, and do their best not to get killed in the process.

Missouri, 1860. Rumors of war between the North and South are spreading across the land. In rural Green County, many of the farmers are already choosing sides. But not John Zachary. His loyalties lie with his family first - and his heart is telling him to go west. Hoping to build a new life in the fertile valleys of Oregon, he convinces his best friend, Emmitt Braxton, to pack up their families and join him on a wagon train across the Oregon Trail. The journey will be long and hard.

In the Wyoming wild, Blackfoot warriors prepare for battle, their bloodlust stirred by a legendary prophet promising victory in a war that will forever rid the plains of the white man. To legendary mountain man Preacher, it isn't a promise - it's a threat. But being out-numbered in a savage frontier means justice will be as hard-earned and uncertain as...survival.

Matt Bodine and Sam Two Wolves became blood brothers years ago in Wyoming Territory. So close that they can almost read each other’s mind, they’ve both got minds of their own. But when Matt Bodine, making time with Wyatt Earp’s woman in Tombstone, feels an inexplicable chill in his bones, he knows his brother is calling out to him. A hundred miles away, Sam is in more than trouble - he’s in chains at the hands of a murderous human slaver. Suddenly, Sam’s life is hanging by a thread - along with the lives of dozens of innocent men.

For Smoke and his daughter Denny, life on the Sugarloaf Ranch is more valuable than all the gold in the world. Which works out fine, since all the gold mines in Big Rock were squeezed dry years ago. Even so, that won’t stop a pair of businessmen from the East from trying to squeeze out a little more. One of them has developed a newfangled method for extracting gold—something called “hydraulics”—and they’ve bought up all the old mines to do it. Smoke isn’t sure what to think of. Especially when they hire a small army of gunfighters to protect their mines from sabotage.

If there's one thing Smoke Jensen hates, it's a man who fights dirty. And no one fights dirtier than a politician. Especially a lying, cheating, no-good grifter like Senator Rex Underhill. Luckily, with another election coming up, this senatorial snake in the grass has some serious competition: Smoke's old friend, Sheriff Monte Carson. Carson's an honest man, and he's got Smoke's full support. But Underhill's got support, too: a squad of hired guns ready to hit the campaign trail - and stain it red with blood...

Frank Morgan has just settled in Montana when the frontier erupts in violence. The ranchers are determined to drive the settlers away from the land by any means necessary. Desperate, the settlers turn to Frank, who knows a thing or two about surviving a firefight.