Showing results for "Michael A. Smith" in Genre Fiction

I am sure that what I remember is not necessarily what actually happened, but I can only write what I remember. Wildly inventive and magnificently surreal, The Smiths: A Novella recounts the impact of an unconventional pop group from Manchester on one man's life. Taking the form of a flâneuring...

A stunning first novel full of empathy, marked by an astounding maturity of insight. Cumberland is both a place and a state of mind; it is a small-town story of longing and loss in the manner of David Adams Richards. It is an exploration of loneliness and the fear of loneliness in lives limited by circumstance. Cumberland is an industrial town located halfway between Ottawa and Montreal on the shore of the St. Lawrence River. It's facing the close of its factories and mills in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In the lonely years following the death of her fiancé, Helen is unable to move on with her life. But life itself is moving on around her literally: The building of a dam is forcing her small town and her family home to relocate. But the construction project means more than the loss of a home. Helens brother, Robbie, who disappeared without a trace 15 years earlier, suddenly resurfaces. As he re-enters his sisters life, he reveals the secret of why he left in the first place: a secret that tore their family apart, and affected Helens life in more ways than she ever realized.

Set in a fractured United States, in the southwestern country now known as Texoma. A world where magic is acknowledged but mistrusted, especially by a young gunslinger named Lizbeth Rose. Battered by a run across the border to Mexico Lizbeth Rose takes a job offer from a pair of Russian wizards to be their local guide and gunnie. For the wizards, Gunnie Rose has already acquired a fearsome reputation and they’re at a desperate crossroad, even if they won’t admit it. 

He was 15 when he killed his first man. Before his murderous ways ended, Hardin killed 42 men in cold blood - one, the legend goes, because he snored too loudly. From then on, John Wesley Hardin stayed true to his calling, killing man after man after man, spending most of his life being pursued by both local lawmen and federal troops.

With Apaches on the prod, ex-cavalry sergeant Sean Keegan, bounty hunter Jed Breen, and ex-Texas Ranger Matt McCulloch take shelter in a West Texas way station — along with a hot-as-a-pistol female bound for the gallows, a spiteful newspaper editor, and a coward with $50,000 who promises them five grand if they’ll deliver his blood-soaked stash to his wife.

London might as well be a world away from Sandsend, a tiny village on the Yorkshire coast. Gideon Smith dreams of the adventure promised him by the lurid tales of Captain Lucian Trigger, the Hero of the Empire, told in Gideon’s favorite “penny dreadful.” When Gideon’s father is lost at sea in highly mysterious circumstances Gideon is convinced that supernatural forces are at work. Deciding only Captain Lucian Trigger himself can aid him, Gideon sets off for London. On the way he rescues the mysterious mechanical girl Maria from a tumbledown house of shadows and iniquities. 

Trapped in a remote cabin, surrounded by ruthless gunmen, Matt Jensen and his adoptive father Smoke Jensen join forces with their old friend, Preacher, in the greatest fight of their lives. A ruthless cattle baron has waged an all-out war against the peaceful native tribesmen who have become Preacher's friends. In a bloodthirsty bid for land, power, and wealth, the baron's drafted an army of professional killers to destroy the homesteaders - among them the Jensens are the only men brave enough to stand in his way.

The war between the States has ended. Now, driven from Texas by carpetbaggers, former CSA Colonel Shamus O'Brien sets off for a new frontier - New Mexico. Here, where land is cheap, bandits shoot to kill, and rustlers rule the night, it takes more than one man to run a ranch. So he offers a partnership to his eldest son, Jacob, with equal shares going to his sons Sam, Patrick, and Shawn. Together, the brother's O'Brien will defend their homestead, the Dromore, in this violent, lawless land...and when necessary, administer their own brand of frontier justice.

Two of the Johnstones’ most legendary heroes—the rugged mountain man known as Preacher and the Scottish clan rancher Jamie Ian MacCallister, here together for the first time—are forced to choose sides in a blood-soaked battle for the heart and soul of a nation divided. This is not the American dream they were looking for. This is a nightmare. A brutal, blood-drenched frontier war that two heroic men must fight and win—or one struggling nation will never come together. For liberty and justice for all.

It’s the dawn of a new century. But on the vast Sugarloaf Ranch not much has changed since legendary gunfighter Smoke Jensen and his wife Sally tamed the land two decades ago. Raising cattle is still a dangerous business — and just as deadly as ever. When Smoke is injured swapping bullets with some cow thieves, Sally puts out a call for help to Matt, Ace, and the rest of the Jensen clan. But time is running out. The bloodthirsty rustlers are ready to strike again — and there are lots more of them. And the Sugarloaf’s last defense is Smoke and Sally’s next of kin....

"Stay the hell out of Fort Worth." Those were the last words uttered by a dying man who was the boomtown's most recent sheriff. Rail-thin and half starved, desperate cowpuncher Jess Casey ignores the travel advice. Instead, Jess not only enters Fort Worth, he becomes the new sheriff, inheriting the body-riddled little slice of heaven called Hell's Half Acre, the wide-open, deadliest piece of real estate on the American frontier.

An unpredictable, poignant, and captivating tale for readers of all ages, by the critically acclaimed author of Only Forward. There are a million stories in the world. Most are perfectly ordinary. This one… isn’t. Hannah Green actually thinks her story is more mundane than most. But she’s...

Before Nick Carraway moved to West Egg and into Gatsby's world, he was at the centre of a very different story one taking place along the trenches and deep within the tunnels of World War I. Floundering in the wake of the destruction he witnessed first-hand, Nick delays his return home, hoping to escape the questions he cannot answer about the horrors of war. Instead, he embarks on a transcontinental redemptive journey that takes him from a whirlwind Paris romance doomed from the very beginning to the dizzying frenzy of New Orleans, rife with its own flavour of debauchery and violence.

An old woman, riddled with dementia, walks off into the woods in the middle of the night. A light in the wood draws her to a campfire with two strange, dangerous men, one young and one old, who are there plotting a crime of as-yet-indeterminate purpose. The two men have a job to do. They are hunting something precious but have only been told: you'll know it when you see it.

For 11 years the clock has been ticking for Russell Gaines while he's sat in Parchman Penitentiary in the Mississippi Delta. His time now up, and believing his debt has been paid, he returns home only to discover that revenge lives and breathes all around.

In the hurricane-ravaged bottomlands of South Mississippi, where stores are closing and jobs are few, a fierce zealot has gained a foothold, capitalizing on the vulnerability of a dwindling population and a burning need for hope. As she preaches and promises salvation from the light of the pulpit, in the shadows she sows the seeds of violence.

In this timeless, mythical tale of unforgiving justice and elusive grace, rural Mississippi townsfolk shoulder the pain of generations as something dangerous lurks in the enigmatic kudzu of the woods. The town of Red Bluff, Mississippi, has seen better days, though those who've held on have little memory of when that was. Myer, the county's aged, sardonic lawman, still thinks it can prove itself. When confronted by a strange family of drifters, the sheriff believes that the people of Red Bluff can be accepting, rational, even good. The opposite is true. 

The Fighter is a brilliant novel set against the dark and desolate backdrop of the Mississippi Delta, where Jack the Jaw, a washed-up bare-knuckle fighter, battles against decades of booze and drug abuse as he returns home to try to save all he has lost. The acres of fertile soil, the 200-year-old house, all gone. And so is the woman who gave it to him, the foster mother who now rests in hospice care, her mind eroded by dementia, the family legacy she entrusted to Jack now owned by banks and strangers.

For more than a year Royce Melborn has tried to forget Gwen DeLancy, the woman who saved him and his partner Hadrian Blackwater from certain death. Unable to get her out of his mind, Royce returns to Medford with Hadrian but the two receive a very different reception—Gwen refuses to see them. The victim of abuse by a powerful noble, she suspects that Royce will ignore any danger in his desire for revenge. By turning the thieves away, Gwen hopes to once more protect them. What she doesn't realize is what the two are capable of—but she's about to find out.