Lou Cameron – författare

For once they were sending Stringer on a nice easy assignment. All he had to do was scribble out a story about an outlaw gunned down fifty years before. As far as Stringer was concerned, it was an ideal excuse to make a trip back to his hometown in the Sierras. But it''s a homecoming of hot lead and hotter ladies. Someone wants Stringer dead almost as bad as the local females want him alive. Stringer doesn''t know why so much trouble is suddenly finding him, but he suspects it must be might ugly for the town to welcome a hometown boy with double dealing and easy death.

Sheriff Commodore Perry Owens just lost his first election in seventeen years. Maybe folks in the Arizona Territory were ready for a change, and then again, maybe Stringer ought to go have a look-see. The trouble is that Perry has vanished and everyone who knew him is either dead or vanished too. But when hot lead and hard knuckles start flying, Stringer''s belt-buckle deep in ghostly mystery and willing women. And even if the ghosts may be hokum, the women are flesh-and-blood beauties.

Stringer was just doing his job when he went to hear Teddy Roosevelt speak at a railway stop in Granger, Wyoming. But Stringer''s job is to write about the speech—not get shot at. So suddenly a certain reporter has a powerful curiosity about who wants him six feet under. There''s just one hitch. Stringer can''t be sure if the bullet was meant for him or old Teddy. Now all MacKail has to do is dodge a pack of hired killers, swap lead with a few train robbers, match wits with a renegade Shoshoni, and bed a few lusty ladies on a trail that could end up on the front page—or in the obituaries.

Cheyenne, Wyoming, is a town that''s leaping into the twentieth century spurs first. Pretty soon Cheyenne will be just as newfangled fancy as any Eastern city. But the folks there still know how to have fun. First the rodeo—and then the hanging. It''s the rodeo that Stringer has been sent out to write about. However, before he knows it, he''s up to his neck in the West''s most notorious murder case. They''re fixin'' to hang Tom Horn, but something in town smells worse than a stable boy''s boots, and Stringer aims to find out what it is.

They say Judge Roy Bean has been up to some legal tomfoolery again. And it''s MacKail''s job to get the scoop on the infamous "hanging judge." But someone is out to stop Stringer—dead. Now it could be old Bean and some of his boys. Or maybe it''s just another Lone Star gunslick with too much nerve and too little smarts. The only thing MacKail knows for sure is that newspaper men ain''t welcome, especially not around Bean or his laughing pack of blood-simple coyotes. The only person who even says howdy is a south-of-the-border bandit about to turn revolutionary. But with Pancho Villa on your side, you don''t need any enemies.