Comanche: A Novel

“Brett Riley’s COMANCHE is the best western-horror-thriller-ghost story-PI novel ever written." —Tod Goldberg, author of Gangsterland

A chilling blend of Western horror, supernatural suspense, and detective fiction, in which a team of New Orleans investigators hunts a killer who may be the vengeful ghost of an outlaw gunned down more than a century earlier.

In 1887, near the small Texas town of Comanche, a posse brings the murderous career of the Piney Woods Kid to a violent end in a hail of bullets. But death isn't enough for the bloodthirsty vigilantes. They drag the outlaw's body to the dead house behind the train depot and hack his corpse to pieces. The townspeople rejoice. Justice has been served, and a bloody chapter in Comanche's history appears to be closed.

More than a century later, in 2016, a brutal double murder at the same train depot leaves local police baffled. Witnesses insist the killer was dressed like an Old West gunslinger. As fear spreads through the town, so do whispers that the Piney Woods Kid has returned from the grave to exact revenge on the descendants of those who killed him.

When a team of investigators arrives from New Orleans, they encounter a community reluctant to reveal its secrets. Haunted by their own troubled pasts and increasingly isolated from the townspeople, the investigators follow a trail of evidence that leads deeper into Comanche's violent history. But as they close in on the truth, they discover that the killer may already have them in his sights.