Legendary gunslinger Bat Masterson is facing a hangman's noose-unless his old friend Clint Adams can clear his name.

"Hotheaded Cable Lockhart is about to beat Bat Masterson at poker for the third night in a row, but the legendary gunslinger wins it all back in one hand. Furious at his defeat, Lockhart storms out of the saloon with everyone worried he'll shoot Masterson. But it's not Bat who's found dead the next morning--it's Cable. And Bat's standing over the body. With Bat locked up in jail, it's up to his old friend Clint Adams to save him from the hangman's noose--and from Cable's brother, who's quick with a gun and hungry for vengeance."--P. [4] of cover.

The instant New York Times bestseller! Dodge City, Kansas, is a place of legend. The town that started as a small military site exploded with the coming of the railroad, cattle drives, eager miners, settlers, and various entrepreneurs passing through to populate the expanding West. Before long, Dodge City’s streets were lined with saloons and brothels and its populace was thick with gunmen, horse thieves, and desperadoes of every sort. By the 1870s, Dodge City was known as the most violent and turbulent town in the West. Enter Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. Young and largely self-trained men, the lawmen led the effort that established frontier justice and the rule of law in the American West, and did it in the wickedest place in the United States. When they moved on, Wyatt to Tombstone and Bat to Colorado, a tamed Dodge was left in the hands of Jim Masterson. But before long Wyatt and Bat, each having had a lawman brother killed, returned to that threatened western Kansas town to team up to restore order again in what became known as the Dodge City War before riding off into the sunset. #1 New York Times bestselling author Tom Clavin's Dodge City tells the true story of their friendship, romances, gunfights, and adventures, along with the remarkable cast of characters they encountered along the way (including Wild Bill Hickock, Jesse James, Doc Holliday, Buffalo Bill Cody, John Wesley Hardin, Billy the Kid, and Theodore Roosevelt) that has gone largely untold—lost in the haze of Hollywood films and western fiction, until now.

The colorful figures of the western American frontier, the Indian fighters, the mountain men, the outlaws, and the lawmen, have been romanticized for more than a hundred years by writers who found it easier to invent history than the research it. "Bat" Masterson was one such character who cast a long shadow across the pages of western history as it has been routinely depicted. "A legend in his own time," he was called in a television series produced in the 1960's. A legend he has become—one firmly fixed in the popular imagination. But in his own time W.B. Masterson was a man, a less-than-perfect creature subject to the same temptations and vices as his fellows, albeit one who, through circumstance and inclination, led an exciting life in an exciting time and place. As buffalo hunter, army scout, peace officer, professional gambler, sportsman, promoter, and newspaperman, Masterson's career was stormy and eventful. Surprising to many readers will be the account of Masterson's career after his peace officer days, during his employment as a sports writer and columnist. The gun-toting western peace officer reputed to have killed more men than Billy the Kid (not so, says DeArment) spent his last years happily in New York City, writing for a nationally known newspaper. This book, the product of more than twenty years of research, separates fact from fiction to extricate the story of his life from the legend that has enmeshed it. It is the most complete biography of Bat Masterson ever written.

The legend of Bat Masterson as the heroic sheriff of Dodge City, Kansas, began in 1881 when an acquaintance duped a New YorkSun reporter into writing Masterson up as a man-killing gunfighter. That he later moved to New York City to write a widely followed sports column for eighteen years is one of history’s great ironies, as Robert K. DeArment relates in this engaging new book. William Barclay “Bat” Masterson spent the first half of his adult life in the West, planting the seeds for his later legend as he moved from Texas to Kansas and then Colorado. In Denver his gambling habit and combative nature drew him to the still-developing sport of prizefighting. Masterson attended almost every important match in the United States from the 1880s to 1921, first as a professional gambler betting on the bouts, and later as a promoter and referee. Ultimately, Bat stumbled into writing about the sport. In Gunfighter in Gotham, DeArment tells how Bat Masterson built a second career from a column in the New YorkMorning Telegraph. Bat’s articles not only covered sports but also reflected his outspoken opinions on war, crime, politics, and a changing society. As his renown as a boxing expert grew, his opinions were picked up by other newspaper editors and reprinted throughout the country and abroad. He counted President Theodore Roosevelt among his friends and readers. This follow-up to DeArment’s definitive biography of the Old West legend narrates the final chapter of Masterson’s storied life. Far removed from the sweeping western plains and dusty cowtown streets of his younger days, Bat Masterson, in New York City, became “a ham reporter,” as he called himself, “a Broadway guy.”

"Just terrific... As real as a heart attack, and every bit as suspenseful." --John Lescroart, New York Times bestselling author of A Plague of Secrets, on The Trial Veteran trial lawyer Larry D. Thompson has decades of courtroom experience in his home state of Texas on controversial and important trials. Now, in Dead Peasants, Thompson has delivered a fast-moving and suspenseful legal thriller featuring a retired lawyer whose life gets turned upside down when a stranger asks for help. Jack Bryant, exhausted after a high-profile career as a lawyer, takes an early retirement in Fort Worth, Texas, where he plans to kick back, relax, and watch his son play football at TCU. But then an elderly widow shows up with a check for life insurance benefits and that is suspiciously made payable to her dead husband's employer, Jack can't turn down her pleas for help and files a civil suit to collect the benefits rightfully due the widow. A chain of events that can't be stopped thrusts Jack into a vortex of killings, and he and his new love interest find themselves targets of a murderer. Gripping, engaging, and written with the authority that only a seasoned lawyer could possess, Dead Peasants is a legal thriller that will stun and surprise you.

The lawmen in this book were serious offenders against the laws they had at one time sworn to uphold. Their skills were honed in range wars and family feuds and polished along the cattle trails, in the saloons and banks, and on the trains of the West. More than one kicked out their lives at the end of ropes strung up by citizens who were outraged by their abuse of the trust that went along with the badge they wore. These are their stories.