Skull Gold — Ray Hogan

Highroller's Man

It sounded like a good job with nice pay. But Starbuck soon found himself mistrusted by the very ones who hired him! He even met opposition from beautiful Carla Flood, daughter of the “Highroller” he had sworn to protect. But treachery seemed to lurk everywhere in the town of San Ignacio. Why did so many want to kill Orville Flood and how would Starbuck stop them? Could he just quit and ride away and still live to tell the story?

Skull Gold

They brand his brother a thief and murderer �" but Starbuck believed Ben innocent and was determined to prove it. He had searched too long for his missing brother to find him strung up for a crime he hadn't committed. But was pretty Cassie Truxton, wife of a jealous employee of the Big Skull Mining Company, and secretly in love with Ben, a help or a hindrance? Starbuck suspects the latter, but he's powerless to stop her from following him on a ride that leads to an encounter with savage Apaches ...

Ray Hogan is an author who has inspired a loyal following ever since he published his first Western novel Ex-marshal in 1956. Hogan was born in Willow Springs, Missouri, where his father was town marshal. At five the Hogan family moved to Albuquerque where Ray Hogan lived in the foothills of the Sandia and Manzano mountains. His father was on the Albuquerque police force and, in later years, owned the Overland Hotel. It was while listening to his father and other old-timers tell tales from the past that Ray was inspired to recast these tales in fiction. From the beginning he did exhaustive research into the history and the people of the Old West and the walls of his study were lined with various firearms, spurs, pictures, books, and memorabilia, about all of which he could talk in dramatic detail. Among his most popular works are the series of books about Shawn Starbuck, a searcher in a quest for a lost brother, who has a clear sense of right and wrong and who is willing to stand up and be counted when it is a question of fairness or justice. His other major series is about lawman John Rye, whose reputation has earned him the sobriquet The Doomsday Marshal. ‘I've attempted to capture the courage and bravery of those men and women that lived out west and the dangers and problems they had to overcome,” Hogan once remarked. If his lawmen protagonists seem sometimes larger than life, it is because they are men of integrity, heroes who through grit, character and common sense are able to overcome the obstacles they encounter despite often overwhelming odds. This same grit of character can also be found in Hogan's heroines and, in The Vengeance of Fortuna West, Hogan wrote a gripping and totally believable account of a woman who takes up the badge and tracks the men who killed her lawman husband by ambush. No less intriguing in her way is Nellie Dupray, convicted of rustling in The Glory Trail. Above all, what is most impressive about Hogan's Western novels is the consistent quality with which each is crafted, the compelling depth of his characters, and his ability to juxtapose the complexities of human conflict into narratives always as intensely interesting as they are emotionally involving.