In the Bad Lands

When Bad Land Bill's father stumbles into camp half-frozen and raving with grief, Bill learns his brother Jed is dead, murried by the ruthless rancher Munson, who has taken Dolly, the girl Bill loves. With nothing but a horse, a rifle, and Charlie Shaw, the range boss who rides beside him, Bill heads into the badlands to find them. The landscape is as ruthless as the men who inhabit it: exposed ridgelines, bitter cold, and long miles between water and shelter. Every choice Bill makes could be his last. But he rides on, not just for revenge, not just for love, because a man who won't act when his blood demands it isn't a man at all. Bertrand W. Sinclair writes the American frontier at its most elemental: spare, tough, and stripped of sentiment. This is a novel about what happens when violence comes to a man's door and he must answer it, not with glory, but with the grim arithmetic of the frontier. For readers who want their Westerns lean and mean, where the land kills as surely as any gun.