Devine's Mission now available on Kindle

Devine's Mission is now available on Kindle.

 

 

 

After 2012 's Devine I knew that I would one day write about US Marshal Jake T. Devine again, although it took me a few years before I decided to let him ride again.

Once I'd decided to start writing I had the usual problem that I have with Devine of creating a worthwhile adversary. Marshal Devine is a brutal, no-nonsense lawman who doesn't sit around waiting for the end of the story so that he can shoot the bad guys. He just kicks down the door, abuses everyone in the room, and then blasts the bad guy between the eyes. If he's in a good mood he might vary the routine by spitting on the dead man's face and whistling, but otherwise it's hard to avoid him just wiping out everyone long before the plot can unfold.

So this time I outlined a plot with plenty of twists involving stolen gold and the fiendish plans of master bad guy Scorpio Blake. Then I started writing. Three pages into the story Devine decided he'd had enough of idle chatter and killed Scorpio, which slightly destroyed my outlined plot. So, I just carried on writing and decided to see where Devine would take things. As it turned out, I was surprised by the solution to the central mystery of what had happened to the stolen gold, even though the clues had been there from the moment I wrote the title on a blank page...

Anyhow, the book is now available from amazon.

When Lachlan McKinley raided Fairmount Town’s bank, the four-thousand dollar bounty that was posted on his head attracted plenty of manhunters, but everyone that went after him ended up dead.
Bounty hunter Jonathon Lynch reckoned he could do better. Lachlan was Jonathon’s step-brother and his mission was personal, but when he joined the hunt he soon discovered that all was not as it seemed and Lachlan may, in fact, be innocent. Worse, U.S. Marshal Jake Devine was also after Lachlan.
Devine is more likely to destroy the peace than to keep it, and so can Jonathon bring the guilty to justice before Devine does his worst?

I'm dreadful sorry, Clementine

After a bit of soul-searching I've decided to change the title of my Kindle book Clementine to The Ballad of Dayton Hyde.

Since publication Clementine has taken a serene, almost zen like approach to sales and so I've now decided it needs to buck up its ideas and raise its head above the water. Perhaps the title Clementine didn't evoke the feeling of a western as much as I thought it would. Perhaps it conjures up images of fruit that goes mouldy before you can get it back from the supermarket. Or then again perhaps the world just wasn't ready for a musical version of Raise the Titanic.

Whatever the reason I decided that changing the cover, title and blurb might help, or to be more precise it was unlikely to do much harm to a book that was drifting along like tumbleweed in a dusty ghost town.

The all-old book with its all-new title is now available from all good amazon stores.

When snake-oil seller Fergal O’Brien sells a bottle of his universal remedy to the dying Leland Crawford, Leland makes a miraculous recovery, for several minutes. Then he drops dead.
In the few minutes before he dies, Leland bequeaths to Fergal everything he owns. Unfortunately, Leland’s only asset is his beloved Clementine, a 250-foot sidewheeler that once ruled the Big Muddy, until it sank.
Worse, Leland is heavily in debt and now the creditors expect Fergal to pay up. With Fergal having no money, minstrel Dayton Hyde offers him a way out, but only if he kills Rivertown’s popular lawman Marshal Swift.
To avoid carrying out Dayton’s unwelcome task, Fergal will need to use all his legendary cunning or like as not in this wet weather, he’ll share the fate of Clementine.