Will Toal returns home to discover that his sons have been taken by a brutal desperado who wants revenge for the death of his brother. Will’s foreman has been murdered, and his woman has already gone after the killer that has taken their boys. He heads out after them to set things straight. Just as things begin to look up for Will, he discovers that the woman he loves, the mother of his twin sons has been captured. Can he find her before she’s murdered? Will realizes he is not alone. He’ll do whatever it takes to protect his family, starting with killing Sam Brown. Hell is on the horizon. There will be a SILVER CITY RECKONING “…Crafts’ skillful integration of real-life characters into his narrative is a marvelous accomplishment. He keeps readers anxious as Will goes it alone until he suddenly doesn’t. Bursts of action and colorful characters make this outing a breathtaking ride through the Old West. One man’s crusade to save his family provides pulse-pounding adventure." —Kirkus Review

Will Toal has seen a lot of the world in his twenty-three years, including war, the death of his family, and the loss of everything he owns. The gold his father left him, buried in the family graveyard, provides hope for a new future. He is determined to leave Georgia and the past behind him, and start fresh in Carson Valley, at the base of the mountainous Sierra Nevada bowl cradling Lake Tahoe. But here, Will comes up against a Goliath he never expected—Washington’s support of San Francisco capital and influence to finish the transcontinental railroad as soon as possible. Big business is backed by national pride and unbelievable monetary gain, and this means driving the railroad construction through the upper reaches of Carson Valley—no matter whose land stands in their way. Untenable right-of-way issues lead to a fierce gun battle between the railroad’s hired guns and the Carson Valley ranchers based on the real-life 1880 events of Mussel Slough, California, just outside the city of Hanford. Will and his fellow ranchers must try to survive the indomitable forces and insurmountable odds against them, fueled by more greed for power and money than they could ever have imagined. Can a compromise be reached in the completion of the grandest engineering effort the country has ever undertaken in its history, or will the ranchers and Will find themselves RAILROADED?

Spring 1876 . . . . When a bomb explodes and destroys a sawmill in Glenbrook Harbor, the residents and businessmen on the shores of Lake Tahoe are left reeling. Will Toal and his wife, Beth, are caught in the deadly, fiery fragments of the devastating explosion, and Beth is severely injured. Will gets Beth to the doctor and sets out to find those responsible. Once again, he is drawn back into the crosshairs of business barons clashing among themselves while competing for economic and political clout amid the sliver riches of the West. Will’s been in this position before in earlier days, but this time, the big company money is out to get him—and the things just got personal. Will just wants those who hurt Beth brought to justice, but he must find out who’s responsible for setting that blast—the first of many to come, if he figures right. With the timber business leveling the forests around Lake Tahoe, and the silver mines clamoring for the necessary wood, the arsonists could be working for anyone. Those who don’t believe in the deforestation process will go to any length to save the woodlands, but those who need the jobs lumbering provides are just as determined. Ina race against time, Will is forced to work with an old nemesis, private investigator Dale Paris, to try to stop the arsonists and save the sawmills from disaster. Can they stop the bloodshed? At any price, Will is determined to have CLEAR CUT JUSTICE . . . .

Winner of Columbia University's 2024 Bancroft Prize in American History 2024 Spur Award Winner Named a Best Civil War Book of 2023 by Civil War Monitor In Continental Reckoning renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations. Thirty years later it was organized into states and territories and bound into the nation and world by an infrastructure of rails, telegraph wires, and roads and by a racial and ethnic order, with its Indigenous peoples largely dispossessed and confined to reservations. Unprecedented exploration uncovered the West's extraordinary resources, beginning with the discovery of gold in California within days of the United States acquiring the territory following the Mexican-American War. As those resources were developed, often by the most modern methods and through modern corporate enterprise, half of the contiguous United States was physically transformed. Continental Reckoning guides the reader through the rippling, multiplying changes wrought in the western half of the country, arguing that these changes should be given equal billing with the Civil War in this crucial transition of national life. As the West was acquired, integrated into the nation, and made over physically and culturally, the United States shifted onto a course of accelerated economic growth, a racial reordering and redefinition of citizenship, engagement with global revolutions of science and technology, and invigorated involvement with the larger world. The creation of the West and the emergence of modern America were intimately related. Neither can be understood without the other. With masterful prose and a critical eye, West presents a fresh approach to the dawn of the American West, one of the most pivotal periods of American history.

Abigail Adams offers a fresh perspective on the famous events of Adams's life, and along the way, Woody Holton, a renowned historian of the American Revolution, takes on numerous myths about the men and women of the founding era. But the book also demonstrates that domestic dramas--from unplanned pregnancies to untimely deaths--could be just as heartbreaking, significant, and inspiring as the actions of statesmen and soldiers. A special focus of the book is Adams's complex relationships: with her mother, sisters, and children; with her husband's famous contemporaries; and with Phoebe, one of her father's slaves. At the same time that John exhibited his own diplomatic skills on a better-known canvas, Abigail struggled to prevent the charitable gifts she gave her sisters from coming between them. In a departure from the persistently upbeat tone of most Adams biographies, Holton's work shows how frequently her life was marred by tragedy, making this the deepest, most humanistic portrayal ever published. Using the matchless trove of Adams family manuscripts, the author steps back to allow Abigail to respond to her many losses in her own words. Holton reveals that Abigail Adams sharply disagreed with her husband's financial decisions and assumed control of the family's money herself--earning them a tidy fortune through her shrewd speculations (this during a time when married women were not permitted to own property). And he shows that her commitment to women's equality and education was intense and explicitly expressed and practical, from the more than two thousand letters she wrote over her lifetime to her final will (written in defiance of legislation prohibiting married women from bequeathing property). Alternately witty, poignant, and uplifting, Holton's narrative sheds new light on one of America's best-loved but least-understood icons.

Will Toal had been told his entire family had been killed at the close of the Civil War. Here he finds out that was not entirely true. He has a sister that not only survived but has moved to Nevada not far from his ranch. But his sister has traveled with a beau who is determined to start ranching in the middle of Nevada’s open range. Across the west, large ranch owners had long standing permits to graze cattle on the same open stretches of public land available for homesteads. Those ranch owners let their cattle roam. Unbranded new calves, called mavericks, were collected only during spring roundups. However, homesteaders also collected these new foundlings viewed legally as “public property” in some states, yet the automatic property of stock growers associations in others. The combination of these competing legal and economic interests spanned the entire industry stoking the fires of anger, greed, politics, and the law. When his newly found sister finds herself threatened with the worst kind of violence, Will gets involved only to become a target himself. Wealthy ranch owners and hundreds of local townspeople square off. It takes the U.S. Military by order of the country’s President to separate the combatants. After the legal system could not provide a resolution, Will is forced to re-establish the simple principles of right and wrong and end the Range War himself.

SPUR AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR ROD MILLER It is 1840. The fur trade has all but ended and trappers in Taos feel the pinch. With a band of Ute Indians, they follow the Old Spanish Trail to California to steal horses and mules, then return and reap the profits in Santa Fe. The unprecedented raid results in the theft of some 3,000 animals. Daniel Boone Pickens, a young man on the run from the law in Missouri and in search of a future, signs on for the adventure. Nooch, a young Ute, follows the leader of his band to prove his worth as a warrior. A young vaquero from California, Juan Medina, finds himself involved more from circumstance than choice. Along the trail, the young men forge bonds that surpass race and culture as they face hunger and thirst, fire and flood, bullet and blade. And together they grieve the deaths of more than a thousand of the stolen horses and mules on a mad dash across the dry and desolate Mojave Desert. Based on the real-life exploits of mountain men “Pegleg” Smith, “Old Bill” Williams, and Jim Beckwourth with Ute leader Wakara, A Thousand Dead Horses dramatizes conflicts in the evolving Old West.