Cuno Massey Omnibus Edition Now Available from Five Star

For those of you who prefer paper over ebooks, this western duo featuring two previously published ebook original Cuno Massey novels is now available. It's a beautiful hardcover edition published by Five Star. They've published several of these western duos over the past several years, and many more are on the way. If you haven't read the ebooks yet, you can buy this as an ebook, as well. 

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New Colter Farrow Novel On the Way!

This should be up around mid-January. Mean Pete Press has been on hiatus while I've been writing some paperback Lou Prophet books for Pinnacle (see cover to the left) and doing some ghost work.

I've been wanting to get back to the red-headed, left-handed gunslinger with the nasty S branded into his face, Colter Farrow, for a long time. In this one, Colter is finally going home to his foster mother Ruth and his first love, Marianna Claymore. Only the valley in which Colter grew up in the Lunatic Mountains of southern Colorado is in the grip of a vicious, land-grabbing rancher who wants the valley for himself. He's killed Marianna's husband, burned her ranch, and forced her into marriage with him. Colter's headed home, all right, but he won't be greeted with bells and whistles but with the rocketing reports of Winchester rifles...

Days of Thunder Now Available!

My two ebook-original Dag Enberg, Shotgun Rider westerns--THE SHOTGUN RIDER and TWO SMOKING BARRELS are now available in print. Not only in print, but in a beautiful new hardcover omnibus edition from Five Star. Check it out at Amazon!

DAYS OF THUNDER AT AMAZON

The Secret Life of Peter "Mean Pete" Brandvold!

When Mean Pete isn't writing, you can usually find him in his beer barn, where he brews beer with friends on spring, summer, and autumn weekends... Here, for the first time, is a glimpse inside the brew barn and...drumroll...Mean Pete's secret brew book! (Budweiser's been trying to get their nasty, venal hands on this for years!)

Above, my brew pals, Kent Quamme, who I met when I taught English--and I use the term taught very loosely--over twenty years ago. He's a fellow North Dakotan so we put up with him when others would not. The bearded hombre on the right is Bill Schmidt, whom I met in the hallowed halls of Central Junior High in Wahpeton, North Dakota, 24 miles west of here, just across the mighty Red River of the North, when we were both in the 5th-freakin' grade. Bill's a fan of all things old--cars, pens, motorcycles, chainsaws, (I was going to add women but that would get us both in trouble so I won't) and cameras, one of which he is holding here. Bill rebuilt an old '57 Chevy when he was maybe 12 years old. He can fix anything. I mean ANYTHING! And if it ain't invented yet, he'll invent it! Just so he can break it and fix it!

Here's our brew dog--Buddy--who is very protective of the brew barn...and loves mud.

Mean Pete and Bad Buddy

The brew book and Mean Pete's favorite recipe!

The Sparge:

syphoning the mash juice, aka beer, into our boiling kettles.

Book 3 in the Yakima Henry Quartet Now Available!

SADDLE UP FOR A HARD RIDE WITH THE HALF-BREED DRIFTER, YAKIMA HENRY, IN A BRAND-NEW FOUR-PART SERIES...BLOODY ARIZONA!

Part 3: CHIRICAHUA BLUES

The town marshal of Apache Springs, Arizona Territory—Yakima Henry--has his hands full. Not only has the iron horse arrived in a storm of frenzied hoopla, bringing more crime along with it to the boomtown Apache Springs, but Emma Kosgrove’s secret canyon has been discovered.

One of the two young Southern brothers who stumbled into the canyon is dead, but it’s unclear how he died or who killed him. The other brother was so traumatized by whatever happened to the other brother that he can’t speak, just walks around in a daze, muttering the single word, “Snake,” over and over again...

“Snake...snake...”

Yakima’s senior deputy, the Rio Grande Kid, has his own hands full of more trouble than he thought possible when he pinned the star on his shirt. Yakima sends “the Kid” to Tucson to fetch the murdering rapist, Darl Deakin, and bring him by stagecoach to Apache Springs for trial.

What neither Yakima nor the Kid knew going in, however, was that Deakin has a passel of piss-burned Chiricahua Apaches lead by the formidable war chief Matiotish hot on his trail, intending to exact revenge on Deakin for selling their people diseased beef and causing many young and old Chiricahuas to die.

The Kid’s stage is run into a remote canyon, and now the Kid must fight off the Apaches to save his own hide as well as that of his undeserving prisoner, the hides of several innocent passengers, including an old woman, the old woman’s grandson, and a fetching young doxie named Jackie.

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Fill a Stein and Grab a Bloody Haunch: The Ravings of a Bloodied Veteran of the Word Wars Now Available!

Peter Brandvold has been earning his living as a writer for the past twenty years. He’s written everything from articles and essays and short stories to over a hundred novels published by traditional New York publishers and, most recently, by his own Mean Pete Press ebook-original imprint. He’s written series books, including Longarm and Trailsman, under many pseudonyms, including Frank Leslie, and he also wrote the Bat Lash: Guns and Roses mini-series for DC Comics with John Severin and Sergio Aragones.

Here he is, standing up during a lull in battle, dusting himself off and spewing forth what he’s learned in the trenches, his insights and witticisms on these changing publishing times.

Here you will find the nuts and bolts about how to write with a good bit of chest-thumping thrown into the mix—a heraldic horn blown in a call to arms...or pens...or keyboards.

Here you will also find the simple honesty of a life lived hard and true to the writer’s calling—personal essays recounting a story-telling mother, friendships with dogs, and the ravages of divorce. You will also find two short-stories, one a spine-tingling horror tale set in the piney woods of the Deep South, the other a literary tale of life and death fought out by an old man battling a noxious weed commonly found on the northern prairie.

This is a rousing, entertaining volume for those writers and readers who want and need some inspiration as well as insight into the life not of a rich and widely heralded “author” like Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, but of a blue-collar writer often scrambling to make ends meet, of a writing life fought daily in the muddy trenches, bodies piling up all around, artillery exploding, bullets flying way too close.

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Mean Pete and Bad Buddy Head for the Hills! (And Bloody Arizona Book 2 is live on Amazon!)

Having finished Book 2 in my Bloody Arizona Quartet featuring Yakima Henry, the staff of Mean Pete Press takes the day off and heads for the hills...

CHECK IT OUT HERE!

BLOODY ARIZONA SNEAK PEEK!

Here's a sneak peek at the second book in my Yakima Henry Quartet, which is all but finished and should be up and running on Amazon by this weekend or early next week. (Keep in mind that "the Kid" mentioned here is a paunchy, middle-aged old reprobate still wearing the moniker of the Rio Grande Kid, thereby clinging to the former "glory" of his outlaw years...)

The Kid checked his mount down off Yakima’s left stirrup, matching Yakima’s pace. Emma checked her buckskin down off his right stirrup, also matching the half-breed’s pace.

“I was listening for gunfire,” Yakima said, “thinking you two might shoot each other back yonder. It’s a wonder what gold will do to you.”

“We came to an agreement,” the Kid said tightly, staring straight over his horse’s twitching ears.

“Well?” Yakima said when neither one elaborated.

“We agreed that I wouldn’t shoot him if he left that gold alone,” Emma said, looking past Yakima at her newly minted nemesis, the Kid.

The Kid turned to Yakima, his eyes indignant beneath the brim of his battered Stetson. “I think she woulda done it, just like she said. She woulda gut-shot me an’ left me there to bloat up an’ rot with her old man’s gun wolves!”

Emma winked at him. “My trigger finger is still itchin’.”

The Kid said to Yakima, “She’s purtier’n a speckled pup, Miss Emma is. But I’ve come to believe she’s meaner’n back alley cur with fourteen sucking pups!”

“When it comes to that gold, you better believe it,” Emma agreed.

“What’s the plan?” Yakima asked her. “You going to hounddog him for the rest of his days to make sure he doesn’t ride back out to that canyon?”

“If that’s what it takes.”

“What about you, Yak?” The Kid studied the half-breed lawman, puzzled. “Don’t you want none o’ that gold?”

“Nope.”

“How come?”

Yakima hiked a shoulder. “Believe me, when I first saw that church, I felt the fever. But how would you ever get that treasure out of that canyon without every seedy-eyed border snake in Arizona getting word and running out here to ‘help’? No one could ever be satisfied with only an ingot or two. You’d want the works or you’d never sleep at night.”

He spat over the side of his saddle, and chuckled. “Anyone tries hauling that gold out of that canyon is going to go up against an army of desperadoes intent on relieving them of it. Shit, there’ll likely be a war that’ll make the Misunderstanding Between the States look like a game of schoolyard kickball. Besides, look what that gold has done to you two.”

Yakima looked from the Kid on his left to Emma on his right. “An upstanding deputy town marshal and Hugh Kosgrove’s purty, polite daughter goin’ at each other like a wolf and a mountain lion trapped in the same privy. You two oughta be ashamed of yourselves.”

“It’s not the gold I’m after,” Emma said, defensively. “What I’m after is keeping the gold in the church in that canyon—where it belongs!”

“What do you think, Yak?” the Kid said after they’d ridden in silence for a while, the sun really burning down on them now at nearly midday, not a shadow in sight. “Do you believe that gold is really cursed like this purty wildcat says it is?”

“From the trouble I’ve seen it cause so far?” Yakima said, raking his gaze again between his two trail partners. “Hell, yes, I do!”

First Book in a Yakima Henry Quartet!

SADDLE UP FOR A HARD RIDE WITH THE HALF-BREED DRIFTER, YAKIMA HENRY, IN A BRAND-NEW FOUR-PART SERIES...BLOODY ARIZONA!

Yakima Henry is holed up in an old prospector’s cabin in the wilds of south-central Arizona, between Tucson and Lordsburg, New Mexico. He’s decided to cool his heels until fall, prospecting for gold and hoping for a little color with which to fund a trek into Mexico.

It’s always nice crossing that southern border. It makes him feel like a brand new man. Makes him forget, if only a little, the horror of laying his life’s one true love, the beautiful Faith, to rest in that unmarked grave near Thornton’s Roadhouse in Colorado...

The half-breed wanderer just can’t shake Faith’s memory, however. Not even with the help of the firewater and pretty whore in the Busted Flush Saloon in the little nowhere town of Apache Springs. In fact, the firewater causes the crazed, jade-eyed half-breed to go into a rage and bust up the saloon and half the men in the town until he’s finally subdued and carted over to the local jail—locked up by his friend, Town Marshal Lon Taggart.

THE HALF-BREED PINS A BADGE ON HIS SHIRT...

Yakima’s life gets even more complicated when four strangers ride into town and shoot Taggart while Yakima is locked up in the lawman’s jail. They would have raped Taggart’s wife and burned the entire town to the ground if Yakima hadn’t shot his way out of the jail cell, and intervened.

Now Taggart’s wife calls on Yakima to wear her husband’s badge and go up against a kill-crazy, vengeance-hungry ex-mining engineer, Rebel Wilkes, who sent the men to burn the town and who will surely send more. Wilkes has it in for the town, which refused to sell him access for a spur railroad line, thus ending Wilkes’s dream of developing a mine in the area and, worse, causing him to lose his shirt as well as his pride and reputation.

For Wilkes, Apache Springs must die. His ex-lover, Julia Taggart, as well.

But Julia has become Yakima Henry’s lover now. So Wilkes’s grudge against Apache Springs is personal. So personal, in fact, that the sleepy little desert town will soon become a powder keg of raw emotion and hot-flying lead!

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New Bear Haskell!

MOUNT UP FOR AN EXCITING RIDE WITH A BRAND-NEW WESTERN SERIES IN THE SAME ADULT WESTERN VEIN AS LONGARM!

In fact, it’s written by a veteran Longarm writer...

Meet Bear Haskell, former union war hero, former Pinkerton agent, current deputy United States marshal, and lover of some repute.

Bear’s a big man--over six and a half feet tall and as broad as a barn door. He wears a necklace of bear claws taken from the grizzly that almost had him for supper. That’s the kind of man bear is. He’s holds a grudge and he gives no quarter--to grizzly bears or men.

Bear rides for Chief Marshal Henry Dade out of Denver’s First District Court.

In this fourth adventure, Henry Dade sends Haskell deep into the frozen bowels of Dakota Territory to solve a series of unexplained murders in the little town of Sioux Camp. Two of the town’s prominent businessmen and the postmaster have been gunned down. Tortured with bullets, in fact.

The county sheriff was also killed, and the first deputy U.S. marshal sent to investigate, from the territorial capitol in Bismarck, also met a grisly fate on the streets of Sioux Camp. So now it’s Haskell’s turn to investigate. On the way there, he meets the beautiful daughter of a prominent Dakota rancher, and they while away a stormy night in a storm-wracked hotel in Oxbow, in the best possible, toe-curling fashion.

When Haskell finally arrives in Sioux Camp, he finds the town’s sole lawman there to greet him. But the local lawman’s about as warm and accommodating as a side of frozen beef, for he’s hanging from a noose thrown over a beam in his office!

From there, Haskell’s visit to northern Dakota Territory continues to go even farther south. Things get crazier and even more dangerous when he meets up with a non-hibernating bruin while chasing a potential killer, and the beautiful Sioux madam who runs the local parlor house and calls herself Chance.

Oh, and there’s also Chance’s Sioux bodyguard, Jimmy Two Eagles, and his nasty sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun that threatens to give the nettled lawman from Denver a particularly nasty belly ache.

It’s all here, all-action western adventure in its rawest, fastest form—Bear Haskell, Bullets, Bruins & Lady Called Chance!

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