Longarm wrangles with some cattle rustlers in the heat of the desert! A pack of rustlers have made a recent habit of holding up trains coming through Rampart Valley and raiding their cattle shipments. And they’ve managed to confound everybody in the district by leaving behind not a single trace—of themselves or the stolen cows. Now it’s up to Longarm to ride into the Llano Caliente—the hottest, deadliest desert around—and figure out how a gang of thieves and the beef they stole have managed to vanish into thin air. The sooner he tracks ’em down the better—especially as he’s got a very pretty tomboy who promises to make his coming back in one piece worth his while.

When a pack of rustlers holds up trains coming through Rampart Valley and raids the cattle shipments, they confound everyone by leaving nothing--not a single trace--of themselves behind. Now it's up to Longarm to ride into the "Llano Caliente"--the hottest, deadliest desert around--and figure out how a gang of thieves and the beef they stole vanished. Original.

Longarm sends Paradise straight to hell! Marshal Monty Kilpatrick was nobody’s fool. That’s why his killers had to take him by surprise. But with a bullet in his belly, Monty knew just how to right the last wrongs of his life—he wrote a letter to his good friend Marshal Custis Long, the one they call Longarm. Now Longarm is out to avenge his good friend’s murder and set things right with the man’s family—and he doesn’t care what trail he’ll have to ride, man he’ll have to face, or girl he’ll have to charm to get the job done.

When Longarm arrives at the Sonora Desert, he walks into a den of dangers in a land where a meager existence scratched out from the land has ranchers and Indians ready to kill without much provocation

While recalling a childhood spent in the North Carolina countryside--the same landscape that has served as the setting for most of his many beloved novels--Reynolds Price shares powerful stories of the friends and family who helped shape his life into the man, and the writer, he is today.