The Texas Brigade — Ray Hogan

The Jenner Guns

Junction City and the surrounding Arizona territory were being terrorized by a ferocious Jenner gang of outlaws. Shawn Starbuck takes on the job of sheriff and plans an intricate scheme to capture the Jenners. But further robberies and the appearance of a mysterious woman named Clarissa provide complications that make his plan backfire, dragging Starbuck into a quagmire of treachery and death.

The Texas Brigade

Find the wagon train! That was the command given to the posse searching for a party kidnapped by Comancheros and taken into Mexico. Hearing his long-lost brother Ben is their wagon scout, Starbuck joins up. But the motley crew is troublesome, and Starbuck is forced to take charge. Crossing the Rio Grande into the treacherous Chihuahua Desert, the band is embroiled in deadly gunfighting that cuts the group in half. Then Ben Starbuck is seen, tied and beaten by his captors, on the edge of the canyon. Can Starbuck save him, and bring his long manhunt to an end?


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.