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Fiction of the American West |
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If you'd like personalized book recommendations, check out our Tailored Titles services for both fiction and nonfiction books. |
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The Disappeared
by C. J Box
Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett tackles two parallel cases involving the disappearance of a prominent British executive and a group of falconers who are being harassed by the feds, a double assignment that catches the attentions of a dangerous adversary. By the Edgar Award-winning author of Vicious Circle.
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The Accidental Guardian
by Mary Connealy
Trace Riley has been self-appointed guardian of the trail ever since his own wagon was attacked. When he finds the ruins of a wagon train, he offers shelter to survivor Deborah Harkness and the children she saved. Trace and Deborah grow close working to bring justice to the trail, but what will happen when the attackers return to silence the only witness?
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Westering Women
by Sandra Dallas
Joining other mail-order brides on a dangerous wagon journey to the gold mines of 1852 Chicago, a seamstress with painful secrets discovers strengths she did not know she possessed among a growing sisterhood of fellow women pioneers.
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The Sisters Brothers
by Patrick deWitt
Set against the backdrop of the California Gold Rush, this darkly comic novel follows the misadventures of the fabled Sisters brothers, two hired guns who, under the order of the mysterious Commodore, try to kill Hermann Kermit Warm, a man who gives them a run for their money.
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The Round House
by Louise Erdrich
When his mother, a tribal enrollment specialist living on a reservation in North Dakota, slips into an abyss of depression after being brutally attacked, 14-year-old Joe Coutz sets out with his three friends to find the person that destroyed his family.
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Strongheart: the Lost Journals of May Dodd and Molly McGill
by Jim Fergus
Strongheart is the final installment to the One Thousand White Women trilogy, a novel about fierce women who are full of heart and the power to survive. In 1873, a Cheyenne chief offers President Grant the opportunity to exchange one thousand horses for one thousand white women, in order to marry them with his warriors and create a lasting peace. These women, "recruited" by force in the penitentiaries and asylums of the country, gradually integrate the way of life of the Cheyenne, at the time when the great massacres of the tribes begin. After the battle of Little Big Horn, some female survivors decide to take up arms against the United States, which has stolen from the Native Americans their lands, their way of life, their culture and their history. This ghost tribe of rebellious women will soon go underground to wage an implacable battle, which will continue from generation to generation.
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Upright Women Wanted
by Sarah Gailey
A near-future exploration of queer identity, written in the style of a pulp western, finds a woman stowing away to escape her arranged marriage to a man who was once engaged to the late best friend she secretly loved.
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Where the Lost Wander
by Amy Harmon
Set on Overland Trail in 1853, a young widow sets off with her family for a life out West – a journey fraught with hardship, fear, death and terrible sacrifice that leads her into the arms of a half-Pawnee man straddling two worlds.
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One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow
by Libbie Hawker
After Cora's husband is jailed for killing her lover, who happens to be the husband of their only neighbor, Nettie Mae, the two women must face the duties of working the land and raising their children on the Wyoming prairie in 1876.
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Cave of Bones
by Anne Hillerman
Preparing to speak at an outdoor character-building program for at-risk teens, Tribal Police Officer Bernadette Manuelito discovers the camp in a panic over a missing instructor and a traumatized girl's discovery of a human skeleton in the wilds of the mythology-steeped lava wilderness bordering the Ramah Navajo Reservation.
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Depth of Winter
by Craig Johnson
Welcome to Walt Longmire's worst nightmare. Winter is creeping closer, but for Sheriff Longmire this one is looking to be harsh in a way to which he is wholly unaccustomed. He has found himself in the remotest parts of the north Mexican desert, a lawless place where no horse or car can travel, where no one speaks his language or trusts an outsider, far from his friends and his home back in Wyoming. An international hit man and the head of one of the most vicious drug cartels in Mexico has kidnapped Walt's beloved daughter, Cady, to auction her off to his worst enemies, of which there are many. The American government is of limited help and the Mexican one even less. Walt heads into the one-hundred-and-ten degree heat of the Northern Mexican desert alone, one man against an army.
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Everything She Didn't Say
by Jane Kirkpatrick
A reimagining of the life of Carrie Strahorn covered in her 1911 memoir Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage describes her relationship with her strong-willed husband, struggles with faith and efforts to build a life in the untamed West.
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Whiskey When We're Dry
by John Larison
Facing starvation and worse when she is orphaned on her family's 1885 homestead, a 17-year-old sharpshooter cuts off her hair and disguises herself as a boy to journey across the mountains in search of her outlaw brother.
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The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu
by Tom Lin
Fighting his way across the West to rescue his wife and exact revenge on the men who destroyed him, while settling old scores along the way, Ming Tsu is aided by a blind clairvoyant and a troupe of magic-show performers, some with supernatural powers.
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Wolves of Eden
by Kevin McCarthy
A saga of loyalty and survival in the vast, severe American West. Irish immigrant brothers Michael and Thomas O'Driscoll have returned from the brutal front lines of the Civil War. Unable to adapt to life as farm laborers, they reenlist in the army and are thrown into ferocious combat with Red Cloud's coalition of Indian tribes in the heart of Montana's Powder River Valley. Thomas finds love amidst the daily carnage--which leads to a moment of violence that will change the brothers' lives forever. Meanwhile, following a double murder in an illicit brothel, Lieutenant Martin Molloy sets off to track down the killers. As he journeys to a remote outpost, he meets Irish nationalist rebels and anti-immigrant nativists who prove to be violently opposed to his investigations.
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Outlawed
by Anna North
The day of her wedding, 17 year old Ada's life looks good; she loves her husband, and she loves working as an apprentice to her mother, a respected midwife. But after a year of marriage and no pregnancy, in a town where barren women are routinely hanged as witches, her survival depends on leaving behind everything she knows. She joins up with the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang, a band of outlaws led by a preacher-turned-robber known to all as the Kid. Charismatic, grandiose, and mercurial, the Kid is determined to create a safe haven for outcast women. But to make this dream a reality, the Gang hatches a treacherous plan that may get them all killed. And Ada must decide whether she's willing to risk her life for the possibility of a new kind of future for them all.
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Inland
by Téa Obreht
An unflinching frontierswoman riding out the Arizona Territory drought of 1893 finds her life intertwined with that of a former outlaw whose ability to see ghosts has inspired a momentous expedition.
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Bull Mountain
by Brian Panowich
Taking a job as sheriff to distance himself from his drug-running family and keep the peace in their Georgia mountain territory, Clayton Burroughs is approached by a federal agent who claims he wants to help shut down the family's operations.
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A Dangerous Woman from Nowhere
by Kris Radish
When gold miners kidnap her husband, frontier woman Briar teams up with an emotionally damaged young man and a famous female horse trainer to track down the lawless killers.
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The Trading Post and Other Frontier Stories
by Hazel Rumney
A collection of short story set on the American frontier includes "The Trading Post," by Michael Zimmer, in which an old trader stands his ground against the nephew of the company store owner.
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Doc
by Mary Doria Russell
After the burned body of mixed-blood boy Johnnie Sanders is discovered in 1878 Dodge City, Kansas, part-time policeman Wyatt Earp enlists the help of his professional-gambler friend Doc Holliday, in a novel that also features Doc's girlfriend, the Hungarian prostitute Kate Katarina Harony.
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The Far Empty
by J. Todd Scott
A debut novel by the DEA Special Agent featured on National Geographic's Drugs Inc. follows an unlikely partnership between a newly minted sheriff's deputy and a 17-year-old boy who investigate growing suspicions about the disappearance of the teen's mother.
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Wild Salvation
by Alfred Stifsim
Wild salvation is a western novel that explores diverse perspectives on race and the role of women in the Old West through an epic action-packed adventure. Readers will see a side of the West that has often been left out in fiction as Johnson tangles with bandits, hired gunmen, and racism.
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The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo
by Ian Stansel
A justice-fueled race across the wilds of Northern California reveals the hardscrabble youth and fateful experiences of a preeminent horse trainer who has been murdered by his jealous brother.
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Valentine
by Elizabeth Wetmore
It’s February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town’s men embrace the coming prosperity, its women intimately know and fear the violence that always seems to follow.
In the early hours of the morning after Valentine’s Day, fourteen-year-old Gloria Ramírez appears on the front porch of Mary Rose Whitehead’s ranch house, broken and barely alive. The teenager had been viciously attacked in a nearby oil field—an act of brutality that is tried in the churches and barrooms of Odessa before it can reach a court of law. When justice is evasive, the stage is set for a showdown with potentially devastating consequences.
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The Escapement
by Lavie Tidhar
A lone gunman on a quest to rescue his son in a strange parallel reality, the Stranger rides into the Escapement where he must journey deep into the secret heart of an endlessly shifting, unpredictable and unimaginable world to find what he seeks.
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A Good Man
by Guy Vanderhaeghe
Wesley relocates to a Montana ranch to help negotiate peace between the Native Americans and U.S. and Canadian militaries, an effort that is complicated by his unexpected feelings for widow Ada Tarr.
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Half Broke Horses
by Jeannette Walls
The author offers a novel based on the life of her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, who learned to break horses in childhood, journeyed 500 miles on a pony as a teen to become a teacher, and ran a vast ranch in Arizona with her husband while raising two children, including Rosemary Smith Walls, portrayed in the author's acclaimed The Glass Castle.
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The Saints of Rattlesnake Mountain
by Don Waters
Soldiers, seekers, priests, prisoners, and surfers pursue their fate amid bizarre, sometimes overwhelming circumstances. In “La Luz de Jesús,” a gutless Los Angeles screenwriter, a believer in nothing but the god of Hollywood, must reorient after he encounters a group of penitents in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The decorated soldier in “Española” faces more chaos back home than he did during his tour in Iraq. And “The Saints of Rattlesnake Mountain” pairs a “trustee” prison inmate and a wild mustang horse, both wards of the state of Nevada, as they fumble toward a spiritual truth.
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How Much of These Hills is Gold
by C Pam Zhang
Two orphaned Chinese immigrant siblings flee the threats of their gold rush mining town across an unforgiving landscape where their survival is tested by family secrets, sibling rivalry and disparate goals.
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Avon Lake Public Library
32649 Electric Blvd.
Avon Lake, Ohio 44012
440-933-8128alpl.org |
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