After a few days of some kind of glitch that prevented the cover from showing up in searches on Amazon, I’m pleased to announce that my 14^th book “Trulock’s Posse” is now live on Amazon.

Trulock’s Posse is a standalone work and not part of a series.

While it is full of the kind of action you’ll find in my other Westerns, I think it is much more character-driven than some of my other books.

It features a dozen-man posse consisting of business owners and ranchers who chase after a gang of desperadoes after they murder a town marshal.

The conflict is driven in part by the members of the posse themselves and also the action that takes place around them.

The question I’ve gotten from almost everyone who has read it so far is this: “Is Profanity a real place?”

Profanity is a real place name.

Near Escudilla Mountain in Arizona there is a “Profanity Ridge” marked on the maps, a truly beautiful place that slopes down into a large stand of quaking aspen with big ponderosa pines behind. It’s a really lovely spot.

But the outlaw town of Profanity as described in the book is pure invention.

However, these outlaw towns along the border of Arizona and New Mexico territories in the late 1800s were real.

Most of them are gone now. The small town of Luna, New Mexico, is one of the few that still exists.

Ike Clanton (of OK Corral fame) was hiding out in one of these outlaw towns when he traveled to Springerville, Arizona, and was shot and killed there.

I love this notion of an outlaw town and may well write about one again. Maybe I’ll even resurrect Profanity as a setting in another book.

I really enjoyed writing the characters in “Trulock’s Posse.”

I also like that the title character is not the main character and the main character is not the hero.

Among fiction writers, we talk about ourselves as either “plotters” or “pantsers” (ie: Those who plot their books and those who write by the seat of their pants).

Some books I carefully plot while others I pants.

Trulock’s Posse was definitely a pantsed book.

As such, the roles of the characters unfolded for me much in the same way they will unfold for readers. When I started writing, I couldn’t have told you where it was going. I also didn’t know who the main character was going to turn out to be, nor did I know which character was going to be the hero.

Trulock’s Posse was also a “surprise novel” in that I had no plans to write it. The idea came to me for the novel, and I just started working on it. I put everything else aside and even changed my publishing schedule for 2018 to accommodate “Trulock’s Posse.”

I had already developed one of the characters who appears in Trulock’s Posse for a different novel, and when I started writing Trulock’s Posse it was not in my mind to include that character.

So my “surprise novel” also had a “surprise appearance” by a character from another book that isn’t even written yet.

When you write fiction, any damn thing can happen, and my experience is that the best books are the ones where any damn thing does happen.

So if enjoy reading Westerns, I hope you’ll give Trulock’s Posse a read. It’s very much in the vein of Louis L’Amour or Robert B. Parker Westerns.

If you’ve been looking for an opportunity to read one of my novels but you don’t want to make the commitment of a series, Trulock’s Posse is a great option.

Another really good option Is Too Long the Winter. If you’re curious because you know me personally and want to know what I’m doing at 3 a.m. but you don’t even want to commit to a full-length novel, Too Long the Winter is a good option because it is much shorter than Trulock’s Posse.

If you’re fully committed and you want to jump into a series, the Two Rivers Station series is currently three novels deep and will be growing soon. Two Rivers Station is a traditional sort of Western. I’ve told people it’s my “Gunsmoke” series if you’re familiar with the old James Arness TV show.

The Jackson Speed Memoirs is my first series. Those books are much longer and there are currently six of them. Jackson Speed, set in the 19^th Century in events like the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and the California Gold Rush, is similar to traditional Westerns in terms of themes and settings, but the character is not a traditional Western character (that’s your fair warning).

And if you don’t have any interest in reading a novel or a shorter novel or a series and you don’t care what I’m doing on my computer in the middle of the night, then why are you still reading this?

You can find all of my novels at Amazon.com.