New Colter Farrow Western Sneak Peek!

(I intend to have this available through Amazon in a few days. I've been working on it hard, and it's taken me longer than I expected. But I've been having a real blast writing this fifth book in the Colter Farrow series. I started it back home in Minnesota and I'm doing the final polish here in southeast Arizona. Here, Colter returns home to the Lunatic Mountains. Only, much has changed, and a war rocks the land...)

The first front of the Lunatics, their flame-shaped pediments of towering gray rock streaked with snow that glowed in the high-altitude sunshine, stood up proud and tall on their aproning pedestal of blue-green forest. In the lens-clear light, the crags appeared close enough for Colter to reach out and grab.

But even after three hours of steady riding, they appeared only slightly larger than they had from the outskirts of Hodges. They did, however, look altogether different, for the westward-angling sun now stretched purple shadows into long flues and fissures that hadn’t been visible in the sun’s direct gaze. Now the angling light revealed precariously balanced boulders, slab-sided rock outcroppings, church-like steeples, and steep talus slides over which the dark specks of birds of prey—eagles or hawks or both--circled as they hunted for their evening meals.

As Colter and David continued riding, their horses now snorting and blowing as they lunged up into the lower foothills tufted with forest, the mountain shadows slid over them suddenly.

Just like that, day became night.

Just as suddenly, the air turned brisk, and it smelled of the cold rock jutting above. The craggy peaks were now hidden from view as the riders ascended the forested pedestal atop which the Lunatic Range was balanced.

Colter drew Northwest to a halt at the crest of a steep stone dyke that poked out of the cedar- and pine-peppered shoulder of the mountain, like a broken rib. He curveted the horse, sitting sideways to the mountain, and stared back out over the broad valley from which they’d come. 

The town of Hodges was a distant brown speck to the southeast, nestled in a bowl in the jade valley. Colter wouldn’t have been able to see the settlement at all if not for the diminishing rays of the tumbling sun painting it copper.

Above him, Colter could hear the muffled roar of the wind blowing against the natural stone battlements. Here where he sat Northwest, the air was still. He heard a faint crackling and turned to gaze over his right shoulder.

A heard of mule deer, likely having scented the riders, bounded across a far shoulder of the mountain, just below timberline, the younger, smaller yearlings following the does while a big stag with a massive rack and yoke-like shoulders stood on the incline above, at the edge of the trees, gazing back toward the source of possible danger.

Home.

The wash of sunset colors across the sky. The tang of pine and cold rock. The distant roar of the wind, the occasional screech of hunting raptors. Every cloud and tree shadow, the deep green and purple shadows of the maze of cliffs and mesas jutting around him. Every breath of the air against his face…

Everything whispered that single, comforting, reassuring word in his ears and warmed his blood:

Home.

Colter turned his head to gaze out along his back trail once more, his eyes tracing the slender purple ribbon of the ancient Indian trail that he and David had started following when they’d left the stage road many miles back. He could see only parts of that old trail carved years ago by an unknown people—at least, an indigenous people unknown to Colter.

Only horses could negotiate that ancient trace, which undulated up and over and around all of the many hills and valleys and small canyons and haystack buttes, around or through small bosques and mottes of scrub trees and brush—all the stuff one didn’t even notice until you traveled over and around such obstacles yourself, until this country closed around you and swallowed you, made you feel at once very small and insignificant, very whole and very free.

Alive.

“Hey, Colter—you all right?”

The redhead turned to see David sitting the claybank maybe forty feet up the slope, at the very edge of the spruces and tamaracks darkening behind him and from which came the exhilarating smell of forest duff and balsam.

“I couldn’t be better.”

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. 

TAKE A LOOK AT AMAZON

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.

CHECK IT OUT ON AMAZON!