Narrator

Jack Garrett

Jack Garrett
  • Sam Houston is a living legend in 1861.

    The hero of the Battle of San Jacinto, he had defeated Santa Anna to win independence for Texas back in 1836. He had twice served as president of the Republic of Texas, helped Texas join the Union, and served as senator and governor of Texas. Before settling in Texas, he had been a hero of the Creek War and governor of Tennessee. He had been friends with Andrew Jackson and Davy Crockett, and had been adopted into the Cherokee tribe, whose rights he had often defended and who had named him the Raven.

    Yet now, approaching seventy years of hard living, he finds everything he has fought for being torn asunder. Texas is joining the Confederacy, and Houston, a Unionist who has been cast out as governor, quickly loses power, prestige, and friends.

    He could hide in retirement, but such is not the way of a warrior. The Raven prepares for his most important fight yet.

    He knows this battle will test his endurance and faith. He knows he will need his wife, Margaret, to save him from his own worst enemy—himself. And he knows this war, which will pit brother against brother, will also try to divide Houston’s family. What he doesn’t know yet is that he will find help from long-dead friends and enemies to help him sort out his life and restore his honor.

    Johnny D. Boggs, among the most honored Western writers of the twenty-first century, brings one of Texas’ greatest heroes to life, warts and all, in a character study and love story of a man fighting for his country and legacy—but mostly for his family.

  • The massacre at Fort Mims is what spurred young Davy Crockett to leave his family and become a volunteer scout in the military campaign between American militias and the Creek Indians. It was while serving in this capacity that Crockett earned his reputation as a first-rate scout, which added to his already established reputation as a crack shot. Like many volunteers serving in militias, Crockett also had to concern himself with protecting his wife, his children, and his land from roaming Indian war parties and gangs of frontier renegades who used the distraction of wars to attack and pillage those left behind. It was in these skirmishes that Davy Crockett distinguished himself. It was a chaotic and dangerous time on the frontier, and Davy Crockett and his family seemed to have a ringside seat in the midst of the action.

  • Two tales of action, adventure, and the Wild West from a founding master of the genre, Lauran Paine.

    In “The Crescent Scar,” one man trying his best to stay on the straight and narrow is Sadler Carrel. Once upon a time he was a notorious outlaw known as the Gila River Kid, but he left his violent past behind to work a cattle ranch, always careful to keep the crescent-shaped scar, the only known identifying mark from his former life, carefully covered.

    But when the railroad comes to town, putting up fences that keep his cattle from the water and grazing land, the only one that can protect everything that Sadler Carrel built is the Gila River Kid.

    In “The Man without a Gun,” Jack Swift didn’t choose not to carry a gun; it chose him. After he served his sentence for horse thieving, he was told it’s illegal for a former convict to wear a gun. So he went unarmed into the Arizona territory, where he found a small cattle town, settled down, and became a respected local businessman.

    But when Jack’s young, lame friend steals a horse to run from a cruel uncle, Jack goes after him unarmed, because he knows full well that the uncle does carry a gun and won’t hesitate to use it.

  • Dan Gentry’s military career lies trampled in the dust beside the arrow-pierced bodies of the men who served under him. Deliberately cloaking a dead lieutenant’s foolhardiness with his own silence, Dan Gentry is court-martialed and disgraced. An outcast, he finds pretty Faith Tipton, wounded and unconscious, the sole survivor of an Apache raid. In love with this girl, Dan tries to protect her from the sinister designs of greedy, furtive Caleb Ash—and Dan and Faith are plunged into a maelstrom of deadly perils as the ex-soldier becomes first the hunter, then the hunted.

  • He was still a young man, but he’d used that handful of years effectively, building a bad reputation that spanned the West, his villainy taking different forms everywhere it took roost. Denver knew him as the Doctor; Texans called him Montana; and folks in Idaho called him Texas. On account of his youth, most everywhere else called him the Lonesome Kid.

    But when he finally gets arrested for vagrancy, he tells the sheriff his name is Alfred Lamb. Will that identity stick when he tries to help a rancher battle off a pack of cattle rustlers?

    With a lengthy career in pulps, comics, and early cinema, and with over two hundred full-length Western novels to his credit, including Destry Rides Again and Montana Rides and the iconic Dr. Kildare series, Max Brand’s action-filled stories of adventure and heroism in the American West continue to entertain readers throughout the world.