Robert Vaughan – författare

There''s no peace for Mason Hawke from the ghosts of his past. A drifter and a loner, he''s not looking for trouble when he rides into Wyoming Territory –– but it''s waiting for him nonetheless. Coming to the rescue of a wealthy landowner''s daughter who was kidnapped by a pair of inept outlaws, Hawke finds himself an unlikely hero in a town called Green River.

But his unsought celebrity has earned him some powerful enemies, including a land–hungry lady with a crooked official in her pocket and a ruthless killer on a leash. Justice, it seems, is an illusion in this place where fraud and fortune hunting dance with cold–blooded murder. But all that is about to change in a brutal hail of gunfire now that Hawke has come to play.

A man haunted and changed by war—whose fingers are equally skilled in the arts of music and death—Mason Hawke has found a new home in Braggadocio, Nebraska. But a dustup in the local saloon has forced his hand, and now two bodies lie lifeless on the dirty floor—a situation an unscrupulous cattleman plans to use to his advantage.

Like Hawke, Clint Jessup is running from his past. But Jessup''s sins turned him hard and greedy—and he''s willing to drain bone dry a town that''s trying to build a future, if it puts an extra dollar in his pocket. The blood of a drifter named Mason Hawke is going to oil his money-making scheme. But it doesn''t matter how many killers he sends Hawke''s way, because the target plays by his own rules: draw first, shoot fast, and keep watching your back.

Mason Hawke just wants to be left alone. Born with a musician''s hands, Hawke has spent the past decade using his lightning–quick fingers to deal death instead of tunes, moving from one town to the next hoping to mute the voices of the dead that continually ring in his ears. But while playing piano in a two–bit saloon in Nebraska, Hawke witnesses a couple of roughnecks gun down a friend of his, and a few seconds later, the killer falls, by Hawke''s hand. To honor his dead friend, Hawke travels to her home in New Orleans, but trouble seems to follow Mason Hawke like a hungry dog, and within days, he has put a bullet into a gun–toting thief.

But what should have been a simple act of justice becomes the beginning of a hunt. The man who Hawke shot was part of a business, part of a group, and that group is now determined to take revenge on Mason Hawke. That last tune in Nebraska began a trail that would take him on a winding road, to New Orleans, Missouri, and finally Kansas, before the vendetta that began in Nebraska can finally be put to rest.

The memory of all the good men he killed during the Civil War still haunts former Captain Mason Hawke—fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands, who just happened to be wearing Union blue. Now only bad men can enflame his killing rage.

A drifter who makes his living playing piano in frontier saloons, Hawke has come to a blood-soaked corner of Idaho, answering a desperate call for help from a woman he once loved. War is ripping King Hill apart—born of the ruthless greed of wealthy cattlemen—and it threatens to expose Hawke''s tragic history. But Cynthia Macgregor and her husband Ian know what he can do, and that he''s their only hope against the professional firepower lining up against them. The enemy has the numbers, but the Macgregors have Mason Hawke.

This war is just beginning . . .