COVER GALLERY: BUSHWHACKERS

BUSHWHACKERS

By B.J. Lanagan

Cover art by Bill Dodge
(except book 7)

This nine book series was published by Jove. First book appeared in July 1997 and the last January 2000.
B.J. Lanagan was a pseudonym used by Robert Vaughan.

When the Civil War was over, the regular soldiers of the blue and gray returned to the peaceful lives they had known before. Not so for Win and Joe Coulter, members of Quantrill’s Raiders, the most brutal gang of Yankee hatin’ cutthroats ever assembled. They returned not as heroes, but as wanted men. Now they’re committed to a lifetime on the edge – experts with guns, with women, and with keeping just ahead of the hangman’s rope…

Like others in Missouri, Win and Joe Coulter didn’t take sides during the war. Until a band of marauding Yankees brutalized and murdered their parents. They had nothing left but each other and a desperate thirst for vengeance. Then they met William Quantrill and joined his bloodthirsty Raiders. Killing men at the drop of a hat, the Coulter brothers became two of the most wanted men in the West. And learned just how sweet – and deadly – revenge could be…

After the fall of the Confederacy, every one of Quantrill’s Raiders was a wanted man. But in San Saba, Texas, Yankee hatin’ and baitin’ were still favourite pastimes. Lured there by a promise of easy money, Win and Joe Coulter joined forces with a fiery redhead in a plan to rob her lover – the richest Yankee in the county. Win was happy to oblige the woman, in more ways than one. Because for men with a score to settle, the war wasn’t over – it had only just begun…

Win and Joe don’t like getting shot at, especially by varmints who don’t have skill enough to kill them. Then, after fending off an unsolicited attack, they find themselves a genuine lady in distress – bound, gagged, the works. Her name’s Pamela Wellington, and her daddy owns Camelot, a bright, shining sixty-thousand-acre kingdom in the middle of Texas. But like that golden ranch of yore, there’s foul-smelling evil afoot. And it’s not Joe Coulter’s boots…

Someone’s about to mess with the Bushwhackers. And that means someone’s about to be messed back.

All Win Coulter wanted was a nice hand of poker. But his hand was hotter than the Devil’s coffee mug, and he ended up winning the deed to a Belle Springs saloon named the Desert Flower. Now Win and his brother Joe, have a place to drink for free.

But Belle Springs is run by a sheriff as crooked as an old man’s spine. He runs his own watering hole, and he doesn’t cotton to competition. So it looks like the Bushwhackers will have to ante up a special “sheriff’s tax” – or get out of town.

Yeah, right.

Normally the Coulter brothers didn’t pay any mind to some varmint’s love life. But Win and Joe were down to their last dollars, so they agreed to find the guy’s long-lost lover, a little filly named Cat Clay. It seemed like their easiest job yet. Except that Cat was living smack-dab in the middle of a Mexican ranch war with bullets flying thicker than blazes.

Now they have to find a ruthless killer, settle a ranch dispute and rescue a very lovely lady in distress without ending up six feet under. All in a day’s work for these two men from Missouri…

Epitaph, Arizona. Nice place. Beer’s cold, at least. But Win and Joe barely get two drops to their lips before the shootin’ starts. When the smoke clears, a marshal and two lowlifes are dead, and the Coulter brothers are hip deep in a war.

On one side’s the ranchers. Other side’s the miners. Who’s good and who’s bad ain’t the issue. Who’s gonna survive is. And with the Coulters in town, every two-bit gunslinger’s chances just dropped to zero.

These ain’t the kind of fireworks Win and Joe were expectin’. The coldhearted massacre of a Bushwhacker’s family turns their Fourth of July festivities into a funeral. All signs point to the work of Kansas Charley Beckett, a Jayhawker who rode against the Bushwhackers during the war – and who lusts to gut every rebel soldier who ever forked a horse.

Now, the only red, white, and blue Win and Joe want to see are the red of his blood, the white of his eyes, and the blue of his body as it hangs from the gallows…

All Win and Joe want out of the tiny town of Sulphur Springs is a cold beer, a hot bath, and some warm company for the night. But Win’s company offers more than he bargained for when she confides that her brother has been murdered by an outlaw rustler bent on ruining every rancher for miles around. It’s more than the Marshal can handle, but word is that it’s something the Coulter brothers can…

The Coulter brothers have gone their separate ways for the time being. While Joe’s strikin’ gold, Win is being tracked by someone with a well-placed burr under his saddle…

But what really rankles Win is his less-than-hospitable welcome in Horseshoe, Nevada. After being left for dead in the street, all Win wants is a good meal, a cold beer, and the sultry coos of a soiled dove. All that stands in his way is a no-good sheriff, whose mouth is faster than his draw. Killing the man gets Win a date with the gallows. But you can’t count one Coulter out while his brother still has the gumption – and the guns – to do something about it…

Cover Gallery: The Tracker

THE TRACKER

By D.R. Bensen

Across the West, following every faint scent and clue, rides a man sworn to hunt and kill the outlaws who murdered his family. Today, tomorrow and always, he is The Tracker.

The night of fire and blood drew a smear of red across lawyer Cole Brandon’s life – his wife and family slaughtered by the vicious Kenneally gang. The gang escapes unscathed, and the only one captured is set free on a legal technicality. Brandon’s trust in the law is now shattered – and he becomes a walking dead man. Then an encounter with a tough old mountaineer gives Brandon new life and a new purpose – vengeance. Using any name, any role, any means, he’ll track the gang and their monstrous leader, Gren Kenneally, and kill them one by one.

A faint clue leads him to a brawling Kansas cowtown, then to Bascom, Texas, and a ranch that might hide his man. But before Brandon – now hardcase Carter Bane – can unearth his prey, the town explodes in a private war that throws him in with his prime suspect!

The mayor was a con man who gambled his power for control of the mining boomtown of Kampen, Arizona Territory…the miner put up his savings for some unsuspected riches from the earth…stage robbers waged their lives for fast loot…but gambler Beaufort Callison hadn’t come to Kampen to play poker. Just to find one man and kill him. For Beaufort Callison is really Cole Brandon, The Tracker, and he’s following a clue that may lead him to his quarry.

Kampen may hold one of the men The Tracker is pursuing: a member of the Kenneally gang that slaughtered his family back in St. Louis. Once an ambitious young lawyer, Brandon is now a single-minded avenger. He’s gambling that his prey will cross his gunsights – if he survives the life-threatening hazards of Kampen and its gold-crazed citizens!

On the booming frontier, a reporter needs a nose for news, an ear for a lie, an eye for danger – and a gun for insurance. So does a manhunter. Cole Brandon is both.

Following a wild hunch, Brandon came to Spargill, Colorado, in search of the killers who wiped out his family. Bluffing his way into a newspaperman’s job, he has the ideal cover to sniff around Spargill and turn up the men he seeks. But the job becomes more than a disguise when Brandon’s masterful scheme brings a railroad line in – and saves the town from ruin. Spargill’s starting to feel like home, and a very desirable lady is luring him in another direction, but for Cole Brandon there can be no respite – until his gun has claimed its final revenge!

Carter killed ruthlessly but professionally, to uphold the law as he saw it. Kenneally killed as naturally as he breathed, for profit, fun or convenience. Brandon hunted patiently and killed implacably, slowly filling the bloody ledger of vengeance.

Cole Brandon’s quest for the surviving members of the Kenneally gang, who annihilated his family, leads him to northern New Mexico and the small town of Bezan. There he enlists in a company of irregulars whose aim is to destroy an outlaw band lead by the very man Brandon is tracking – Peter Kenneally. Captain Anson Carter, embittered exile from the Texas Rangers, whips his untrained outfit into seasoned shape, readying them for an all-out assault. But a wily Kenneally stratagem puts Carter out of action at the crucial moment, and it’s up to Cole Brandon to find a way to carry out Carter’s mission…and his own secret one.

A seasoned Texan can make almost anything out of rawhide – a lariat, a crude sledge, a supreme instrument of torture and death. Soft-spoken Cole Brandon was new to Texas, but as rancher Ray Volker’s trail cook he learned fast, feeding the men on the cattle drive and looking for the one among them he would have to kill – with rawhide, bullet, or bare hands.

Gren Kenneally’s gang had slaughtered lawyer Cole Brandon’s family – and left Brandon with one purpose in life: to hunt down and destroy every man who had ridden with Kenneally. Now Brandon watches and waits on the thousand-mile drive to Kansas for the man he seeks to show himself…and die.

He’s a lone-riding salesman, with windmills for his wares. Bigsbee’s a town with a reputation for tranquillity, a precious boon for any weary traveller.

Neither the man nor the town is what it seems. For the rider is Cole Brandon, once a lawyer, now a single-minded avenger, tracking down the renegades of the Kenneally gang who slaughtered his family. And Bigsbee’s been hit hard by the depression that followed the Panic of 1873, making it a battleground for homicidal outlaws and vigilante mobs. Fighting to survive, Brandon gains unlikely help – from one of the Kenneallys he’s hell-bent to destroy. Now Brandon has to make an enemy an ally, and face the deadliest decision a man ever made.

When a warehouse explosion in Philadelphia blasts away the last of the vicious Kenneally gang, Cole Brandon believes his quest to avenge his family’s slaughter is finally done. A former attorney who stepped outside the law for justice, Brandon’s only bedfellows have been fate, fear and death. Now winsome and enterprising Jess Marvell may be the one person who can help him discover his true self – a man buried beneath years of false names, flickering campfires, and flying lead. But just as Brandon dares to make a rendezvous with peace, Gren Kenneally rises from the ashes.

The ruthless gang leader is a target Brandon must confront, though Kenneally now sees behind his many masks. Through Yellowstone’s untamed wilderness Brandon will pursue him – to a roaring waterfall where one of them will be silenced forever.

Cover art by Bill Dodge. 

Published by Pocket Books, the first appeared in June 1992 and the last in December 1993.