Mean Pete Lives! And He's Peddling BELLS OF EL DIABLO!

Mean Pete Press Lives while the Colorado wildfire rages on, and Mean Pete watches nervously the smoke billowing up from behind Horsetooth Rock, prepared to grab his two aged curs, his beer, cigars, and laptop, and hightail it at anytime.  (Anyone care to offer shelter to a beer-guzzling western writer and his two motley old curs?)

Anyway, I've touted this new Frank Leslie book before here a few times, and I am unashamed to tout it once more.  It's the first book in a brand-new series from Signet starting in about two weeks--the actual publication date is July 3.  It's about two Confederate treasure-hunters in the American Southwest and Old Mexico.

Here are the first few opening chapters:



Chapter One


He’d fashioned the bayonet himself back at his family’s Seven Oaks Plantation—ten inches of double-edged steel cut from a plow blade—and it slipped so smoothly through the Union soldier’s dark blue tunic and into his belly that for a second Lieutenant James Allen Dunn thought he’d missed his mark in the misty darkness.

But then there was a crunch of bone as he lowered the Enfield’s rear stock and drove the bayonet up beneath the federal soldier’s sternum and into the hot, thudding fist of his heart.

The Union corporal gasped.

There was a snick of steel against bone as James pulled the blade out of the soldier’s belly.

Another gasp. A strangled sigh.

James stepped out away from the tree he’d been crouched behind. He closed his broad left hand over the corporal’s nose and mouth, and the soldier dropped his Sharps carbine as James drove him back and down, until he was on his back on the spongy ground. The corporal kicked and quivered and flailed his arms, blinking horrifically up at James, who snarled savagely as he applied more pressure to the dying man’s mouth, forcing back a possible scream that would alert his Union ilk skulking about these wooded north Georgia hills and eerie hollows on this hot, chillingly quiet late-summer eve.