Showing results by narrator "Thomas A. Smith" in All Categories

Neither Jon nor Alice feels like they are getting enough and the frustration is tangible. If the other can’t help then who can? Best friends? Colleagues? The corner shop/kebab house owner? Fighting for the remote are Jon and Alice, a twenty-something couple living together in London. Alice enjoys socialising; Jon hates meeting people. While Alice is climbing her career ladder, Jon is quite content on the bottom rung of his.

A girl walks home from school. She's tall for her age. She's wearing her winter coat. Her headphones are in. She's hurrying. She never makes it home. In the aftermath, while law enforcement tries to justify the response, one fact remains: A police officer has shot and killed an unarmed 13-year-old girl. The community is thrown into upheaval, leading to unrest, a growing movement to protest the senseless taking of black lives, and the arrival of white supremacist counter-demonstrators. 

No one thought that MacTrump - Lord of MacTrump Towers, Son of New York - would ascend to the highest position in the kingdom. Yet with the help of his unhappy but dutiful wife Lady MacTrump, his clever daughter Dame Desdivanka, and his coterie of advisers, MacTrump is comfortably ensconced in the White Hold as President of the United Fiefdoms, free to make proclamations to his subjects through his favorite messenger, McTweet. The Democrati, mourning the loss of their cherished leader O'Bama, won't give up without a fight.

The war continues, and the undead ravage the land. Jirom, Horace, and Emanon begin to hope they might free the empire. But can they manage to do so before the dark king conquers the world? 

Jane Candia Coleman is a natural storyteller whose characters come from the lands between the southwestern valleys of Arizona and the Gila Mountains of New Mexico. The night Billy the Kid died is hauntingly depicted in "Corrido for Billy". "Lady Flo" is a memoir, based on historical fact, of the black wife of an Irish nobleman. "Moving On" depicts a young girl abandoned by her family who finds her way with an itinerant Jewish peddler. And "Are You Coming Back, Phin Montana?" is the winner of the 1995 Spur Award for Best Western Short Fiction. 

Two young men in the gold fields of California spend a last evening together as one of them, very sick, confronts his own imminent death. The tenderness between them may seem idealized, but you understand by listening to this story how premature death from accident and disease haunted the lives of far more westerners than death by violence.

Bill Ash, an escaped convict returns to find his father murdered.

A quick-draw tale from the wild west. T. T. Flynn has long been popular with listeners as a master of the Western story.

Haseloff's characters embody the fundamental values - honor, duty, courage, and family - that prevailed on the American frontier and were instilled in the young Haseloff by her own "heroes", her mother and her grandmother. Her stories, in a sense, dramatize how these values endure when challenged by the adversities and cruelties of frontier existence.  

When Harry French left home he was just another kid looking to make his way. But when he comes back four years later, things are different. He's different. Or at least the town thinks so. Now nobody looks him in the eye. He isn't just Harry anymore, he's the Shifter, a gunfighter who brings trouble with him wherever he goes. And as hard as Harry tries, he finds that a reputation is a lot harder to put down than a gun.

Brother Shotgun is about an old buffalo hunter whose return to the plains after the Civil War keeps being delayed by the needs of a young woman who has taken in a number of orphans.

A short story gem in a Western setting...the search of a man for beauty, and how and where he found it.

Does Horace have the power and strength to save what he fought so hard to win? In a setting reminiscent of ancient Egypt and Babylon, where God-Kings and God-Queens hold the power of life and death, Horace, the one-time slave who became a powerful magician, has turned the tables on his former masters. Follow Horace, Alyra, and Jirom as they navigate the hurdles of managing the slave rebellion under the Akeshian Empire's nose. But evil is not content to sit back and let them gather their strength. A new threat is coming in the form of an unstoppable army of the walking dead.

Kelvin and Heln's children are now six years old, and while Charles and Merlain are normal other than being telepathic, Dragon Horace is another story entirely. But when an evil witch hatches a monstrous scheme to send Charles and Merlain to steal the greatest treasure of the Kingdom of Orcs - hoping they die in the process - she reckons without their innate magical abilities...and the sibling loyalty of Dragon Horace.

A boy in Texas waits for a Christmas present he chose from a Montgomery Ward catalog. The present, a brand new, lever action Winchester 1886 and a box of .50-caliber slugs, never makes it there. Instead, the rifle is caught up in a train robbery and starts a long and violent journey of its own - from the hands of a notorious, kill-crazy outlaw to an Apache renegade to a hardscrabble rancher and beyond. But while the prized Winchester is wandering the West - aimed, fired, battered and bartered - Deputy U.S. Marshal Jimmy Mann is hunting for the outlaw who robbed the train in Texas.

Shady Rest, Texas, has the dubious reputation for being the deadliest town in America. Getting yourself killed is as easy as blinking and twice as quick. Sure enough, Matt Jensen hasn't swallowed his whisky before the town's marshal is gunned down before his eyes. Matt defends himself by putting two bullets in the shooter's chest, unaware that he's in line for a $5,000 bounty - as long as he stays in Shady Rest to collect it. And staying gets even more tempting when a red haired beauty decides to be the next town marshal....

Across the border is another wanderer and another tribe. Preacher’s old enemy, Willie Deaver, plies a band of Indians with the deadliest combination possible: whisky, guns, and bullets — then directs them to try out their killing tools on the Assiniboine. The raid reaps a harvest of devastating death, bloodshed, and helpless captives. Deaver is all the more delighted when he learns Preacher is among the fallen.

On the West Texas border, a behemoth is bellowing smoke, fire, and death. This monster is the infamous Abaddon Cannon Foundry, whose weapons of war have spread death and destruction around the world — and made a few men in Big Buck, Texas incredibly rich. Now, a Mexican-born teenager has disappeared into this fortress factory, where men work and sweat as slaves. This boy’s sister wants to learn her brother’s fate, and she just happens to know a man named Shawn O’Brien, the town tamer. 

In Broken Bridle, Wyoming, Jeremiah Purdy, the town's tinhorn sheriff is a college kid who wants to become governor some day. But outlaw Darius Pike couldn't care less about anyone else's ambitions. With Pike holding Broken Bridle in a bloody grip of terror, Purdy sends a desperate cry for help - to Shawn O'Brien, town tamer. Shawn's mission: ride to Wyoming and pry Broken Bridle loose from Pike's reign of fear. 

In 1864, the frontier cavalry had been withdrawn to fight in the War Between the States, and the able-bodied men had enlisted to join the cause, leaving the families in the Brazos River valley very much on their own...and nearly defenseless. The Comanches and the Kiowas decided this was the perfect time to rid their land forever of the invaders who had threatened their very existence.