Dead Man Ride - Paperback

A stolen wife. A desperate husband. A truth colder than the grave.

Eldridge Sample, former U.S. Marshal and reluctant Texas Ranger, rides into the dying mining town of Ojos Secos looking for nothing more than a bath and a bottle of cheap whiskey. Instead, he finds a shattered window and a scream in the night.

When the notorious Dando Brothers raid the general store, beating the proprietor and riding off with his beautiful mail-order bride and his life savings, the town turns its back. Terror keeps the locals quiet, but obsession drives Arthur Pym, the broken shopkeeper, to beg the stranger with the tarnished badge for help.

Sample takes the job, leading the soft-handed merchant into the unforgiving Chinati Mountains on a suicide mission to rescue a woman who may not want to be saved.

As the trail climbs higher into the "Canyon of Bones," the tracks tell a different story. It wasn't a kidnapping-it was a breakout. And the woman waiting at the end of the trail isn't a victim; she's the architect of a brutal con.

In the shadows of the abandoned La Tumba mine, Sample watches a rescue mission curdle into a blood-soaked vendetta. When a shopkeeper picks up a gun and a wife reveals her true face, the line between justice and murder vanishes in the gun smoke.

"I didn't come for my wife. I came for the receipt."

A gritty, noir-drenched Western thriller that explores the darkness of the human heart.