Showing results for "Westerns" in Amateur Sleuth

When Eleanor Wooley's best friend Rette suddenly disappears, Eleanor abandons her job as a crime reporter for the Gold Strike Tribune in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and sets off in desperate pursuit. What begins as a search and rescue operation quickly becomes an obsession and a personal quest for truth. Spurred by gut instinct, Eleanor scours Northeastern Nevada during the worst heat wave in recorded history. Obscure signs appear-an intruder's dire warning, a casino's mysterious graffiti, a random sighting of a killer on the run.

When a hunted military whistleblower and his family need someplace to hide and someone to trust, Toussaint, Montana, is the place, and Gabriel Du Pre the man. The Metis Indian former cattle inspector and sometimes deputy is happy to offer protection, even though he's got his hands full with an ailing granddaughter, a meddling medicine man, and a Kazakh eagle hunter prowling the hills above town. As a guard at a Kabul prison, Hoyt Poe witnessed his fellow soldiers abusing the Afghan inmates. Poe's testimony threatens to expose the military contractor that led the interrogation program.

At first, Twister Malone and Chuckaluck Thompson think it must be a mirage. If real, the willow trees they see on the horizon mean that water is nearby, and in this dusty stretch of the Southwest, water is rarer than gold. They rub the grit from their eyes, yet the sight remains. There really is water up ahead - and death just around the corner. Someone has opened a sluicegate, allowing all the precious liquid to drain into the dirt. When Twister and Chuckaluck close the gate and the roaring stops, a woman screams, "Don't let him get away! He was going to kill me!"

Twister Malone and Chuckaluck Thompson are making their way through a West Texas canyon when they smell death. Finally, the two emerge onto the mesa, where they encounter the site of a massacre. A whole family of deer lies dead around a small pond, their skeletons bleached by the Texas sun. Someone has poisoned the water hole. Then a rider comes around the corner, rifle in hand, and gets the drop on Twister and Chuckaluck.

Twister Malone and Chuckaluck Thompson can't catch a break. All they want is a trail to follow straight through to Mexico, where a ranching job offers honest work, peace, and quiet. But no matter how fast they ride, trouble keeps hot on their heels. A gunshot breaks the silence of the lonely wagon road. By the time Twister and Chuckaluck reach the corpse, the killer is long gone. In the victim's pocket they find a letter from a woman begging for help, a woman whose savior now lies dead in the alkali dust.

Clinching is the technique used to bend a driven horseshoe nail to hold the shoe to a hoof. Rainy Dale is The Clincher, a 20-something high school-dropout turned farrier (horseshoer) who is haunted by a secret she carries. Estranged from her California D-list actress momma and her ranch hand Texas daddy, she tracked down her childhood horse in small-town Oregon - a land full of cowboys and their horses - then stayed to build a life with her tools, steel, and forge. She’s sleeping in a garage and trying not to fall for her landlord, the hapless and hopeful chef, Guy.

Jon Talbot is a history professor who makes sense of the past by examining facts. He also knows how to speculate about the what-ifs. Jon’s doing both following the death of his wife, Pax. Driving home late from a volunteer assignment, she plunged off a mountain highway and died. The police find nothing suspicious about the facts: a deer in the road, a blown tire, a broken neck. But the what-ifs are leading Jon down a twisting trail of secrets. After five years of marriage, he is finally getting to know his wife.