Trouble Rides Tall / Cross the Red Creek / Desert Stake-Out

TROUBLE RIDES TALL Bryant Shafter is the trouble marshal. Town leaders call him in when they need a gun to quiet things down. Which is why Bry settled in Pony Wells. But now the town is under control. They don t need him anymore more particularly, they don t need to be paying his salary. Even his young deputy, Zach Adams, thinks it s time he moved on. So when three businessmen from Gravehead make him an offer to leave Pony Wells to clean up their town, he s sorely tempted holding down the law is what Bry does best. Until a young prostitute named Glory is found murdered. Until the town bosses hire their own guns. Until a young buck named Rio, out to prove himself, comes gunning for him. Now Bry s got a townful of trouble. CROSS THE RED CREEK Jim Gilmore is on the run from the rumors that plague him. When he is mistaken for a bank robber in Kiowa, Wyoming, he decides to take a stand. He knows he s innocent, so he turns himself in and is acquitted. But he remains guilty in the eyes of the town folk. Still, Gilmore is looking for a place to settle down, and decides that Kiowa is no worse than anywhere else. People will talk wherever you go. But trouble seems to follow Gilmore, and he is soon accused of another robbery. This time he figures it s personal, and if he doesn t find out who s trying to frame him, he might find himself at the end of noose instead. DESERT STAKE-OUT There is an epidemic at San Carlos, and Blade Merrick is riding the medicine wagon across Apache territory. That s when he meets up with Hardhead Charley Clinton, his son Billy, and Perch Fisher... and Valerie, headed out West with her husband. They had all just met when they were attacked by Apaches. Merrick leads them to a water hole he knows about. Merrick has been here before this is where he found the bullet-ridden body of his brother. Now, he has a new problem, because the Clinton gang wants to go to Fort Ambush, in the opposite direction. And they ve got the guns to back up their request. Merrick finds himself torn between the returning Apaches, the desperation of three hardened men, and the most desirable woman he has ever met in his life.

Harry Whittington was born in Ocala, Florida, in 1915. When his family moved to a nearby farm, Harry survived his family s rural poverty by reading books and sneaking into the local movie theater. Another escape was his writing. Ultimately the versatile Whittington would become known as King of the Paperbacks, publishing over 170 original paperback novels, using nearly 20 different names. Before his death in 1989, Whittington also carved out a second career writing Southern historical novels as Ashley Carter. Today he is best known for the lurid and brisk noir novels he wrote between 1950 and 1960.