Showing results by narrator "Eric Dove" in All Categories

After three years in exile in Mexico, the Rio Kid slipped back into the United States, evading the clutches of a Texas Ranger, a crooked rancher, and a gang of desperadoes. Now he's ready to press on to Arizona to clear his name and find his fortune. There may be a $10,000 price on his head, but the Kid is unafraid - he has his gun, his horse, and his freedom. When a scream splits the black Texas night, the outlaw rides toward it. In a godforsaken cave, four men are beating a terrified young boy. The Kid draws two .45s and steps into the line of fire.

After being run out of Arizona on a trumped-up murder charge, the Rio Kid spent three years in Mexico, learning how to shoot quicker than any man on the range. Now he's headed home to clear his name. But before he reaches Arizona, the Kid will have to pass through the deadliest border region in the West. Nestled snugly in a bend of the Rio Grande, Hell's Half Acre is a lawless outpost claimed by both Mexico and the United States, and belonging to neither. There, justice comes from the barrel of a six-gun, and the only sentence is death.

A lone rider stops at the border, preparing to return to the United States for the first time in three years. When he left for Mexico, the Rio Kid was 18, a terrified youngster fleeing a fraudulent murder charge. He returns a grown man, with blood on his hands and twin .45s on his hips. His destination is a small town in Arizona, where he plans to clear his name and reclaim his legacy. But there is a lot of trail between here and there.

Carved into the rugged landscape of the Big Bend region by the hoofs of galloping horses bearing desperate men, it crosses the muddy waters of the Rio Grande into Mexico, where freedom - of a kind - can be found. Ten years ago Jim Markle rode the trail south, fleeing for his life. Now he's coming home with a new name: Stormy Knight. For years young Jim had chafed under his stepfather's whip. Everything changed the night he gunned down the evil old man.

The Vietnam draft is removing the staff of a rural Wisconsin bar one by one. Dishboys, bouncers, and a bartender named Roger are the latest to get induction notices, each showing a proud face while secretly terrified to face the medical examiners who will determine their fate. When help comes from an unexpected place, new problems arise. Shortlisted for Best American Short Stories 2015, Larson's intimate psychological portrait of fear takes the familiar and turns it into something utterly original.

Twister Malone and Chuckaluck Thompson can't catch a break. All they want is a trail to follow straight through to Mexico, where a ranching job offers honest work, peace, and quiet. But no matter how fast they ride, trouble keeps hot on their heels. A gunshot breaks the silence of the lonely wagon road. By the time Twister and Chuckaluck reach the corpse, the killer is long gone. In the victim's pocket they find a letter from a woman begging for help, a woman whose savior now lies dead in the alkali dust.

Do spirits return? Houdini sneaks into the Winchester Mystery House to find out. Set in 1915 during the San Francisco World's Fair, King of Chains looks back at the mad passions of the first half of the 20th century.

Vacaville layabouts Constantine and Ralphie get a rude awakening when the rodeo hits town. Constantine has been getting by managing his late father's photo shop until he meets sisters Allison and Lisa, itinerant rodeo ticket-takers who end up moving into his life and his bed. But things can't stay the same after Ralphie's addiction issue forces them to make a choice about what they're willing to give each other as they grapple with issues of identity, leadership, and sexuality.

Forty years after her son's tragic death, Betty tells the story to a fellow traveler in Ireland. Interspersed with her version of events, we hear her son, Stephen, telling us his own story of longing and loss and about the lunge at life that became his undoing.

It's 1980 on Florida's Gulf Coast. Sun, drugs, gambling debts, and dirty deals push navy-prison parolee Scotland Ross deeper into the life of crime he never wanted. His sister's life, a potential newfound love, and his own freedom are all on the line as he tangles with a redneck gangster intent on becoming the state's next governor.

The breathtaking memoir by a member of "Nicky's family", a group of 669 Czechoslovakian children who escaped the Holocaust through Sir Nicholas Winton's Kindertransport project. My Train to Freedom relates the trials and achievements of award-winning humanitarian and former Episcopal priest Ivan Backer.

The Chinese dragon is flexing its muscles. As its military begins to prey on neighbors in the South China Sea, attacking fishing vessels and scheming to seize natural resources, the US goes on high alert. But a far more ominous danger lurks closer to home: a Chinese sleeper cell has planted a nuclear weapon in the harbor at Norfolk, Virginia, the biggest naval base on the planet. The target: a secret rendezvous of the Atlantic Fleet aircraft carriers and their battle groups.

Vicky Clay awakens with chills. She's still glowing from her victory in last night's steeplechase - the genteel form of horseracing for which the Virginia gentry lives and dies - but that's not why her skin tingles. She has been poisoned, and within seconds she's as useless to the world as a thoroughbred with a broken leg. The stakes are high in the world of Virginia horseracing, where fortunes are won and lost by a hair.

The lands of the Five Duchies are in chaos. They are leaderless, and each land stands alone. Besieged by barbarians, savages, fell beasts, and infighting, few doubt that the end times are upon them. Yet all is not lost. In the East, Lady Katarina Emberhill has begun an uprising against the Usurper and those who follow her carry relics from the time of the High Kings.

Peter, a disgraced meteorologist and chronic wanderer, has traveled the country for years in his Winnebago, in search of the only thing that gives his life meaning. He's just arrived in the middle of nowhere-Hokie, Kansas-for the same purpose, but when he meets a waitress named Melanie, another sufferer, he's faced not only with his first real human contact in years, but perhaps someone who can save him.

Despite that outrageous threat, plantation owner Boyd Jardine buys Caleb and puts him to work in the fields. But soon Jardine discovers that his new slave is both better educated and more widely traveled than himself. When Jardine's pregnant wife dies and Caleb saves the unborn child, Jardine grows increasingly dependent on him not only as a servant but also as a companion - and so their relationship as master and slave begins to change.

Shortly before September 11, 2001, Joe Biden warned, "The question is not if we will be attacked by terrorists, but rather when and where." In the pages of No Safe Place, terrorism has come to America once again. Sleeper agents for a radical Islamic terrorist group that calls itself Ansar Inshallah have managed to blend into American society and go undetected - until now.

Life is good in Elmhurst, Ohio. The war is over, the economy is booming, and the future looks bright. But just across the deep ravine known as Dog's Run is a different life, one where times are always hard and dreams seldom come true. When Wanda Jean Reider, a beautiful young woman from the wrong side of town, is found dead in Dog's Run secrets begin to come out. Secrets that will expose hidden sins and a dark side of life carried on behind the manicured lawns and inside the back rooms of the stores along Main Street.

She was found with a bullet in her head, and the kid she was last seen with woke up drugged and disoriented in a neighbor's backyard. Now the kid is awaiting trial for her murder, and crime reporter Matt Isaacs is convinced that there's more here than meets the eye. But Matt's old college pal, Ethan "Hutch" Hutchinson - washed-up actor and newly-minted trial junkie - isn't so sure, until a violent attack propels Hutch and his friends into the middle of a conspiracy that takes them all the way from the courthouse gallery to the not so hallowed halls of an exclusive Chicago prep school...

Ally Turner is shaken by the death of her childhood friend, starlet Willow Scott - and horrified when devilishly charming Tom Proctor starts digging into Willow's past for a tell-all bio, threatening to unearth a scandalous secret that must be kept hidden at all costs.