Silver Horse Western

I've received a contract for my 25th Black Horse Western Beyond Redemption and it should be published later in 2012.

As I'd reported a few months ago, the title slipped into my mind after writing The Search for the Lone Star, and as I couldn’t get the phrase out of my mind I had to see if I could make a story out of it. The story bumbled along slowly for a while with several unrelated plot threads that refused to find a connection. Then Booklife asked me to do an interview and in answering a question about my attitude to writing bad guys I mentioned that I was pleased with an editorial comment I'd once had that my bad guys were never beyond redemption. In one of those dolly zoom moments I realized why the phrase had lodged in my mind and instantly I knew what the story was about, namely whether or not my bad guys were really beyond redemption. Anyhow here's my suggested blurb:

As a child Jeff Dale witnessed the terrible aftermath of an atrocity. Elmer Drake killed three members of a family and when the surviving girl Cynthia went missing, Jeff vowed that one day he'd find her, no matter how long it took.

Ten years passed and the adult Jeff had become a bounty hunter when he found his first clue about Cynthia's fate by recovering her locket from the thief Wilfred Jarrett. So Jeff followed the clues to the frontier town of Redemption where stalked a gunslinger who carried a gun in one hand and a cross in the other, a man with a rope burn around his neck called Elmer Drake.