SONGBIRD by Colby Jackson (Bill Crider)

As part of the writing team for Rancho Diablo, I’ve made it a point to not post reviews of the books my fellow writers have written. Thought I would just stay conveniently out of the way and let readers find the books on their own – which they’ve been doing quite nicely, thank you. However, […]

THE SILVER ALIBI by James Reasoner

Years ago, James Reasoner created the character Judge Earl Stark, a U. S. Circuit Judge roaming the Old West who dispensed justice with a courtroom gavel and a rather large LeMat pistol, which fired a shotgun blast as well as nine bullets. Reasoner wrote three well-received books about the judge, the Stark appeared to vanish […]

RIO MATANZA by Wayne D. Dundee

Wayne D. Dundee started out writing private eye fiction, and he still does that, but lately he’s added another layer of narrative to his acumen: the Western. Rio Matanza is his second novel in the Bodie Kendrick Bounty Hunter series, and he offers up action by the bucketful in this tale. The full-length novel opens […]

BULLET FOR A VIRGIN! by Peter Brandvold

Peter Brandvold, also known as Frank Leslie, writes a lot of Westerns, and now he’s dipped his pen into the self-publishing biz with a vengeance. Bullet for a Virgin is his first Rio Concho Kid story, and the author has promised it won’t be his last. In fact, on the last page of this novella, […]

THE LONG BLACK TRAIN by Heath Lowrance

“The Long Black Train” is the second short story featuring Heath Lowrance’s gritty gunslinger who squares off with the supernatural. This story has a little more set up than the last tale, and a few pages pass by before Hawthorne appears on the scene. But once Hawthorne is there, things get weird in a hurry. […]

THAT DAMNED COYOTE HILL by Heath Lowrance

“That Damned Coyote Hill” is the first of Heath Lowrance’s Hawthorne short stories featuring a bounty hunter (I think, though that’s more hinted at than definite). In this first story, he’s out looking for personal vengeance, though. To me, Hawthorne seems more like Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane character, a wandering soldier of fortune who’s […]

REDEMPTION, KANSAS by James Reasoner

Redemption, Kansas is one of the more human Westerns I’ve read of later. Author James Reasoner invests time and emotion in his characters in this book that pays off for the reader. This is one of those books that could be effortlessly translated into a movie. The main character, Bill Harvey, is a young Texas […]

THE NAME’S BUCHANAN by Jonas Ward

When I was a kid, I read a lot of Westerns. Cheap paperback adventures I’d picked up from swap shops and favorite secondhand book stores. Those books came with yellowed, dog-eared pages and what seemed like the smell of gunsmoke oozing from them, which was probably just dust and mold. But each one of them […]

THE LONER by J. A. Johnson

J. A. Johnstone’s series The Loner has been around for a while, and has even been on my radar enough that I picked up a couple of books and never got around to reading them. Westerns are one of those genres of choice when I want to simply vege and forget about the world. And […]

DUST OF THE DAMNED by Peter Brandvold

I’ve read some of Peter Brandvold’s Westerns under his name as well as the Frank Leslie name, and I’ve enjoyed them as solid actioners that are quite a bit harder edged than anything Louis L’Amour ever wrote. And his latest release, Dust of the Damned, is way weirder than anything L’Amour wrote even back in […]