Returning home to Dodge City after tracking down a band of killers, Deputy U.S. Marshal John Kilcoyn is greeted by Bat Masterson with a ransom note demanding $10,000 in exchange for a local doctor and his daughter. The note is signed by Jake Pride-an ex-lawman turned thief who Kilcoyn put in jail. Now, Pride is out of jail, and out for bloody revenge.
Joe West was born and raised in the seaside town of Saltcoats in Scotland. At 19 he became a police officer, but soon turned his love of writing into a career as a journalist, working for the Daily Mirror in London among others. In 1972 West was recruited as a reporter for the National Enquirer, and began working in the United States. Traveling the world in search of stories, West almost froze to death on an Alaska mountain, and a spider bite nearly killed him in the Amazon rainforest. 'I swelled up like a balloon and turned a real pretty violet color,' he recalls.
Now a full-time novelist, West and his wife Emily reside in sunny Palm Beach, Florida, where he enjoys tamer pursuits like canoeing the alligator-infested swamps of the Everglades. His 22-year-old daughter Alexandria attends a local college where she studies forensic technology. She will have absolutely nothing to do with canoes and alligators.
West researches the settings of his novels by exploring the terrain in person, usually with little more than a sleeping bag and a can of coffee.
Recently he and Emily celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary at the Lodge in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, a gift from the students at Rio Rancho High School who use West's first novel as a textbook. They then spent a month in the mountains and deserts of New Mexico, often pitching their tent where the air is thin at 9,000 feet above the flat.
