Riley Fitzhugh is temporarily made officer in charge of the naval guard on board the SS Carlota, a merchant ship assigned to deliver bombs and aviation fuel to the Sebou River during Operation Torch. The Atlantic crossing was supposed to be in convoy, but Carlota breaks down after surviving a U-boat attack and is forced to limp along alone.
Riley Fitzhugh is recruited by the OSS for temporary duty as a naval spy in Morocco. Riley’s assignment is to kidnap a French river pilot and extract him from Casablanca. Riley meets an old flame from his days in Hollywood, and these two have some surprises waiting for them.
The eve of World War II. A Hollywood producer’s murdered wife. Her husband’s guilty memory of a shipboard romance. A stolen painting signed “Picasso.” French gangsters. A beautiful courtesan. A shoot-out in a brasserie. All these and more confront Private Detective Riley Fitzhugh as he travels from Hollywood to the Riviera, Paris, and London in search of his client’s vanished dream girl and some answers.
Evoking the spirit—and danger—of the early American West, this is the story of the Battle of Beecher Island, pitting an outnumbered United States Army patrol against six hundred Native warriors, where heroism on both sides of the conflict captures the vital themes at play on the American frontier.
This novel is the latest in the series featuring Riley Fitzhugh. With the advent of the Second World War Fitzhugh leaves his private detective business in Los Angeles and joins the Navy. He goes through officer training and gets assigned to the PC 475, an anti U-boat vessel. The 475 is nicknamed The Nameless by her crew, because patrol craft were only given numbers. The ship patrols the Gulf of Mexico during the early days of the war. Fitzhugh and the Nameless uncover and destroy German supply station in northern Cuba and track the crew of a damaged U boat. Along the way Fitzhugh has a few adventures in Havana, where he meets both Ernest Hemingway and his glamorous wife, Martha Gellhorn.
Private-investigator-to-the-stars Riley Fitzhugh finds himself caught up in the case of a missing Hollywood beauty—and a stolen Monet—in a 1930s hardboiled caper as deadly as it is delightful.
In the summer of 1874, Brevet Major General George Armstrong Custer led an expedition of some 1000 troops and more than one hundred wagons into the Black Hills of South Dakota. This fascinating work of narrative history tells the little-known story of this exploratory mission and reveals how it set the stage for the climactic Battle of the Little Bighorn two years later. What is the significance of this obscure foray into the Black Hills? The short answer, as the author explains, is that Custer found gold. This discovery in the context of the worst economic depression the country had yet experienced spurred a gold rush that brought hordes of white prospectors to the Sioux’s sacred grounds. The result was the trampling of an 1868 treaty that had granted the Black Hills to the Sioux and their inevitable retaliation against the white invasion.
In February 1861, the twelve-year-old son of Arizona rancher John Ward was kidnapped by Apaches. Ward followed their trail and reported the incident to patrols at Fort Buchanan, blaming a band of Chiricahuas led by the infamous warrior Cochise. Though Ward had no proof that Cochise had kidnapped his son, Lt. George Bascom organized a patrol and met with the Apache leader, who, not suspecting anything was amiss, had brought along his wife, his brother, and two sons. Despite Cochise’s assertions that he had not taken the boy and his offer to help in the search, Bascom immediately took Cochise’s family hostage and demanded the return of the boy. An incensed Cochise escaped the meeting tent amidst flying bullets and vowed revenge.What followed that precipitous encounter would ignite a Southwestern frontier war between the Chiricahuas and the US Army that would last twenty-five years.
“I began to get tired of staying in one place so long.” So said Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known to all as Mark Twain. Ironically, the quintessential American writer spent many years of his life living and traveling around the world. Sometimes because of wanderlust, sometimes because of economic necessity, he was on the go constantly. And along the way he encountered colorful characters, strange institutions and cultures, a variety of adventures and misadventures, all of which he incorporated into his travel writing-writing that reflects Twain’s matchless eye for irony, humor and, now and then, tragedy. Mark Twain on Travel is a timeless collection of some of Twain’s best writing, as he catalogued the antics of what he came to call “the damned human race.”
Though he made his name and his fortune as an author of Western novels, Zane Grey’s best writing has to do with fishing. There he was free from the conventions of the Western genre and the expectations of the market, and he was able to blend his talent for narrative with his keen eye for detail and humor, much of it self-deprecating, into books and articles that are both informative and exciting.
in Jack London on Adventure, are excerpts from his well-loved works, which were the result of his restless quest for experience, combined with “his observations of unalterable facts,” as editor Terry Mort writes in his introduction. Lose yourself in the sheer unending quietude of the North in “White Fang” and “The White Silence”; enter into the listless, worried mind of an elder in “The League of the Old Men”; prepare to sail around the world for seven years’ time alongside the author-turned-captain, himself, in “The Cruise of the Snark,” where the famed boat is built with each dollar earned from London’s writings; and peek into the observations of seasoned sailors and the foolish passengers they carry in “The Sea Wolf.” Mort ends with the statement, “A complex man and artist is hard to capture in a single image,” but in terms of the unlikely and unknown, London’s works here capture the thrill that burned in him so brightly.
The first novel in the Ethan Grey trilogy. “It’s not my fight,” said Ethan Grey. It didn’t matter. Mexico was at war, and he was in it. He’d wanted a cruise in warm waters, a chance to forget the war he’d just fought, the War Between the States. But the ship he chose so casually had another mission, and like it or not Ethan Grey was on board. The storms at sea, the battles with enemy ships, the long trip overland through hostile territory, the flight from French mercenaries; it became his war, too. But this time, at least it was simpler. It was just a fight for his friends. And for Maria.
The best baseball novel of the season – ANY season. No fans are more perpetually disappointed than those of the Chicago Cubs—a team that has not won a World Series since 1908. And chief among the forlorn is Jack Frost. From his assigned seat in the cafeteria at the Bide Awhile Rest Home, Jack reads the sports pages every day and checks out the standings. In the middle of June, the Cubs are already thirteen and a half games out. Last place again—or rather, still. Into this sea of depression drops one Clarence Beazely, a new resident at the home and a baseball fan. But Beazely is not your everyday fan, nor is he your everyday rest home resident. He has extraordinary powers, and in a very friendly way he offers Jack a tantalizing deal. Of course it comes at a cost, but if the price seems a little steep, does it really matter as long as the Cubs might have a chance to be… WORLD CHAMPIONS?
When the British defeated the French at Quebec in 1759, they not only guaranteed Britain’s acquisition of Canada but also, unwittingly, paved the way for the American Revolution. But this is a larger story than just the single day of battle on September 13, 1759. The final action was the culmination of a summer-long campaign involving a series of engagements between the British Army, American Rangers and the Royal Navy on one side, and the French regulars, the Canadian militia and Indian allies on the other.
The second novel in the Ethan Grey trilogy. Ethan Grey has seen too many good people die to regret killing the bad ones. An educated man, a former sailor who shelled Vicksburg for the Union Navy, Grey has come to Hell’s own training ground on the Mexican border. The Pinkertons want him to find out who hijacked an army payroll and left eight soldiers dead beneath the blazing sun. Amid ambush and bloody betrayal, he’s right at home.
The third novel in the Ethan Grey trilogy. T. A. [Terry] Mort is a shining new star in Western fiction. His novels are drenched in period detail and evoke a time in American Western history (the 1880s) that few writers have been able to capture successfully. His work is colorful, with solid, believable characterizations. Mort writes in the tradition of the finest Western storytellers: Ernest Haycox, Louis L’Amour, and Larry McMurtry. Mort’s protagonist, Ethan Gray, like Brand’s Destry and L’Amour’s Sackett Brothers, is larger than life, but nevertheless believably human.” In this book Ethan travels the length of Arizona in pursuit of assorted criminals, and along the way, to his surprise, he also acquires a family.
