Herne the Hunter Series

Jed Herne - Herne the Hunter - is on the trail of the corrupt US Senator. A man who has sent others to kill Herne to protect himself from the gunman's vengeance. Firing on a cylinders until its brutal end Shadow of the Vulture is a modern twist on a classic tale of the Old West.

Number six in the savage Herne the Hunter series. It seemed simple enough. All Herne had to do was go down over the border, hand over $5000 to some Mexican rebels and deliver a wagonload of antiques in New Orleans. For Herne, things have a way of getting complicated. When greed and double-cross and a man called Whitey Coburn were involved things got more complicated and nastier.

Becky rolled and slithered further and further towards the river. Everything she tried to grab hold of gave way in her hands. She clawed frantically at the mud but only succeeded in tracing patterns in it. Until she came to a sudden stop against something hard. Becky looked around, then upwards. Her heart stopped, her mouth sagged open: it was a pair of boots. The owner of which leered down at her through the mist which was rising off the ground. He had the strangest eyes and skin she had ever seen. Becky had seen no man like him before. It was Isaiah Coburn: the albino. ‘What a present to be made to us in such difficult times,’ he grinned ... (A Herne the Hunter Western #2:)

The sun was getting well up, and its warmth was melting the snow fast. Its rays broke through the open doorway, striking across towards Louise, and as she moved through them, Jed saw her face properly for the first time. It took all his self-discipline to stop himself jumping up and grabbing her. There was a great bruise under her right eye, and her nose had been bleeding. A thread of black blood crept drily from the corner of her mouth, down across her chin, on her neck. And there were deep scratches around her throat. He realized that Yates had also seen it at the same moment, hearing the strangled gasp, and feeling the man’s body tense in the chair beside him, ready to leap up. Herne reached across and seized his arm, squeezing it with all his strength ...

Whitey was on him like a lean panther, swinging the pistol like a club at the back of the boy’s head, catching him a solid blow. The sentry crumpled to his hands and knees, mewing in pain, barely conscious. As Jed kicked the outer door shut, shooting the main bolt across, he heard the sickening crack, like a ripe apple being trodden underfoot, as Whitey swung his gun a second time, smashing the top of the guard’s skull to a bloody pulp. Ignoring the body, that lay still twitching at his feet, the albino bent and wiped blood and matted hair from the foresight of his Colt on the fancy waistcoat, adding a macabre layer to the decorations. “Leaves us three,” he said ...

Emmie-Lou Parsons wanted to escape from her overbearing husband. So it was almost a relief when One Eye and his Apaches captured her. Parsons wanted her back and hired Herne the Hunter to do it. Parsons’ money meant that he’d get her back, whatever resistance he met. And the seductive Emmie-Lou, a band of savage Indians, and the Mexican bandit men called El Capitan was sure as hell some resistance!

The Colt fell the short distance onto the worn carpet and Herne’s body straightened up like a whiplash. But the hand that had dropped the gun didn’t come back up empty. It had the hilt of the bayonet in it and midway through the movement the blade was unleashed across the room. Seth’s mouth stayed open, words drained in mid-sentence; he moved the gun to fire but something plunged its way into his shoulder blade and pinned him to the door. His hand opened in spite of itself and the pistol slipped out.

Hunting down his quarry in Kansas brought back memories Jed Herne had kept locked away for more than twenty years. Standing over a dying man those nightmares came flooding back. He’d seen a man he knew who’d ridden with Quantrill back in the bloody fighting against the Missouri Jayhawkers twenty years back, butchered by a man who’d used his three year old daughter as bait. Later that same day Herne had also seen William Quantrill hang both man and child from a branch of the same tree. It had been a bad War. He’d been a young boy, full of gall, with his friend Whitey Coburn, dead for more than a year now. He had rode alongside the Younger and James brothers as part of Quantrill’s Raiders through Missouri and Kansas. They’d killed around a thousand folks that year of sixty-three. On August 21 the Raiders launched a raid on Lawrence, Kansas. Their main target was Senator Jim Lane but the guerrillas killed men and boys before burning the town to the ground. These were the memories Jed Herne had lived with. Now he had the chance to exorcise them...

Herne didn’t reckon it was any of his business when Cal Ryder’s men stole the U.S. Government’s printing plates. He wasn’t looking for trouble—only wanted to carry out the sad task of laying Becky to rest for the last time. But trouble hovered around Herne like a vulture, and when he discovered that the gang had rifled Becky’s coffin and stolen the pendent given her by his dead wife Louise, Herne knew that he’d have to take action. Knew that the earth would soon be soaked with blood—blood the color of the pendant’s rubies. 7th in the violent series of Herne the Hunter.

Drummond's vigilantes - an evil cloud passing over the ranch land of Montana, and killing all who stood in their way. At first Jed Herne strung along, needing the money. But one day they went too far ... And from then on it was war!

Jedediah Herne only wanted to play checkers but a fool-hardy youth wanted to draw him into a gunfight. The kid didn’t know he was facing Herne the Hunter. For Herne, it brought back memories of another time; another kid ... New Mexico Territory 1878: The murder of local rancher John Tunstall lit the fuse for a bloody conflict that will be forever known as The Lincoln County War. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder is a legend and one in the making–Herne the Hunter and Billy the Kid. Luckily they are on the same side. Not so for the opposition. Herne hires out his Colt .45 to the Tunstall/McSween supporters against the Dolan/Murphy faction and thus The Regulators are born. The Kid’s gunning down of Lincoln County Sheriff Brady changed the playing field. Soon Herne and the Kid are pitched against lawmen and desperately fighting for their lives. A fast-paced adventure featuring notable figures of the Old West, including Sheriff Pat Garrett, John Chisum, Alexander McSween, Dick Brewer, Lawrence Murphy and the most famous of them all–Billy the Kid. John J. McLaglen is the pseudonym for the writing team of Laurence James and John Harvey. Laurence James began his writing career in 1974 when he published his first novel in the science-fiction series SIMON RACK: EARTH LIES SLEEPING. He worked in publishing for ten years off and on till about 1970, when he went to “New English Library and ran the editorial side of NEL for three years.” In addition, around 1974, James published the fantasy saga of Hells Angels in England & Wales in the early 1990s under the name Mick Norman. While the name of Laurence James is not synonymous with Westerns, those of John J. McLaglen, William M. James and James W. Marvin, to name but a few, are. John Harvey, a former English and drama school teacher began his contribution to the Herne the Hunter series with the second book, River of Blood. “In the Western,” says John, “I’m interested in finding a balance between the myth of the West (as it comes through American literature and film) and the historical reality. Increasingly, I’m concerned to attempt to make a stronger place for women in the Western, which is traditionally a refuge of masculinity and male fantasy.” The character of Jed Herne is like a blunt instrument moving through the West. He never achieves happiness, nor riches. Laurence James said, “There is no such thing as a happy western hero. Never. They can’t be. They’ve got to be men alone. They’ve got to be heroes.”

The words were indistinct and came with longer and longer gaps between them. Herne was forced to kneel beside the man and bend his head sideways so that his ear was no more than inches above the man's mouth. "Edwards ... Jamie Edwards ... prospectin' off and on for thirty years ... hills around ... made strike ... Fallen Lake ... couple of thousand dollars ... silver ore. Tell my wife Nadine ... Cimaron Falls. Promise me." Still Herne hesitated. How many old man had he run into who'd wasted their last years, their dying words over delusions of silver mines and buried ore? But Herne agreed reluctantly to the old prospector's last request and rode into Cimaron Falls in search of the beautiful, wanton Nadine. But what he didn't know was that Jamie Edwards was murdered a brutal gang of train robbers - Zac Peters, P. J. Armitage, Savannah, Tex Blakely and their leader, Waco Johnny Young - a gang who would stop at nothing to lay their hands on the silver ...

When Herne joined up with the U.S. cavalry as a scout he had to expect trouble. A band of renegade Sioux bent on wiping out the hated white-man - that was trouble he knew about. But he hadn't reckoned on trouble from his own side. Trouble in the form of foul-mouthed Sergeant Chance Lattimer who swore that he'd see Herne in Hell ...

In his time Herne had killed a whole lot of me; he'd killed them in war and in what the frontier called peace. There'd been times when he'd worn a badge but mostly he hadn't. He'd killed for causes and he killed for money. Sometimes he even killed for love - like he killed those men who had savagely attacked his pretty wife, Louise ... Now Herne found himself lending his deadly skills to help young Tom Lenegan with the girl he loved. But Katie's family were willing to murder to keep the lovers apart ... but Herne had other ideas ...

Herne made a deal with journalist Thaddeus Ray to help him get some pictures of Geronimo, the famous Apache war-chief. It would have been a well-paid, easy scouting job if the US Cavalry hadn’t been searching for the Apache too. But when Thaddeus and his brother Isaac were captured and brutally tortured by the vicious Mexican dwarf, Jesus Maria Garcia, Herne, left alone with Thaddeus’s wife Carola, knew he was going to have to try and rescue both brothers – against lethal odds.

Wild Rose City, Dakota Territory. Eliza and Lily Sowren ran the town with a fist of iron. Eliza, tall and bony, Lily, short and far – both as tough as nails. On the surface, they were both pictures of elderly virtue, but beneath something altogether different ... As Jed Herne found out, when the sisters called on his special talents to protect their silver mine from an unknown gang of thieves and murderers ...

Herne had been reluctant to ride along with Sheriff Abernathy in a foolhardy search for Senator Jackson’s daughter, who’d been captured by a ruthless Mescalero raiding party. But a $5000 reward helped change his mind. What he hadn’t reckoned on was meeting five savage white kids, fresh out of Death School. And that ghost from the past. A ghost that was hell-bent on revenge ...

Passing through Stow Wells, top shootist Jed Herne needs a tooth pulled. Instead, he walks into a whole lotta bloodshed. When he outdraws and kills a kid out to prove himself, instead of arresting him, the sheriff makes Jed an offer to ride shotgun on a stagecoach laden with silver. Herne accepts and when the stage is attacked he finds himself using his famous guns to deadly effect once again. Then the Abernathy Home for Distressed Gentlemen comes under attack by the Apache Chief Mendez, not only does Herne the Hunter face that challenge and come face to face with a deadly enemy but also a man who claims to be his father!

When bank robber George Wright decides to take advantage of his fleeting resemblance to Herne the Hunter by crediting his own crimes to the shootist, Herne becomes both hunter and hunted — he must track down Wright and his gang in order to acquit himself, and he must avoid a lynch mob of outraged citizens hell-bent on hanging him high.

Herne the Hunter is hired by Major Russell to help resolve the gambling debts of his youngest daughter, Cassie. Herne finds himself knee-deep in trouble when he finds out that the case is more complex than one of just blackmail. The wild blood of the Russell family has gotten involved in pornography and murder and it was up to Herne to get her out – alive.

Jed Herne, riding the vengeance trail, is hunting down Charley Howell, a former galloper with the Pony Express – the legendary mail service that had turned Jed from a callow boy into a man. Charley Howell: liar, drunk, rapist, thief and violent murderer and Kid, a cold-eyed teenage killer, had raped and murdered a banker’s daughter in Wyoming. The banker hired Herne the Hunter to get them both for her brutal and blood-soaked death.

Jed Herne came to the rescue of Mary Anne Marie and her girls whilst on the trail of a gang of bank robbers who'd been posing as a minister and his two sons. Madam Mary Ann Marie offered Herne the Hunter the job of bodyguard to her five 'soiled doves' and able to combine this new post with trailing the gang - Herne accepted. The gang are about to price a high price.

Jed Herne had come across the Cheyney family in a remote Virginian forest, where they were being terrorized by two very strange men. He offered to lead the family to safety - for a price, of course - but first they had to go through the small town of Texas, a town where few people survived to tell of the horrors they had seen there...

Jedediah Travis Herne - the legendary Herne the Hunter - has become a man weary of traveling, of killing, of having no-one to call his own. when he comes to the aid of a beleaguered wagon train, his finds a reason for living - and for dying ... Could this be his last hurrah? The last book in the series