Books by Will Astrike
In April of 1887, US Deputy Marshal Frank "Buffalo Robe" Bass is on leave from his home district in El Paso, Texas, visiting an old friend in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Bass is asked by his friend to investigate the brutal rape and near-murder of a young girl in Torrington, Wyoming, a small town northeast of Cheyenne.
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At first, he is hesitant due to his commitment to El Paso, but he is influenced by the girl's beautiful aunt, Sally Bloom. Eventually, he agrees to go to Torrington. Together, Bass and Sally make a three-day trip to Torrington and, along the way, find love and more than a little danger.
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The course of their investigation involves a powerful cattle baron, outlaws, desperate gunmen, and a few colorful characters that contribute to an exciting conclusion.
Marshal Frank Bass is asked by the son of a US Cavalry Major to assist in clearing his father's name. The Major was in charge of a gold shipment that disappeared and became a suspect in the crime. Making the investigation more difficult is the death of the Major during the perpetration of the crime, and the further implication of his involvement by a nefarious Cavalry Officer who has designs on the treasure himself.
Bass's investigation takes to the reader to various locales in the New Mexico Territory where he encounters a variety of entertaining characters from cantina owners and patrons to Comanche renegades. The Marshal involves his lady-love, Sally Bloom, at the conclusion to help identify and locate the hidden gold in a solution that will surprise and satisfy readers.
Renowned Deputy U.S. Marshal Frank ‘Buffalo Robe’ Bass must travel to the outskirts of his Jurisdiction to investigate the shooting of a prominent rancher’s son by a local sheriff’s deputy. Once he determines that the shooting was a murder and the result of a years-old feud between three ranching families, Bass must discover the true identity of the villain and, in the process, battle a trio of henchmen thrown against him.
A consortium of the crème de la crème of the west’s most evil gunmen has been assembled to further the plotting of Bass’s most formidable foe yet, a hired gunman from the distant north. And all the while, working in the shadows, is a young White man raised as a Comanche warrior who has his own ideas of justice, swift and sure. Nothing will stand in his way as he follows his path of righteous vengeance.
Bass, along with his lady love, Sally Bloom, eventually piece together the plan and foil the efforts of evil-doers reaching from Texas to the Northeast and beyond.
When two girls are kidnapped from their beds on Christmas Eve, their father, a wealthy Texas cattle rancher, enlists the help of renowned lawman Frank Bass in pursuing the villains, and returning his daughters.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Bass, a posse organized by the girls' hometown Sheriff has tracked the kidnappers across Texas and New Mexico to the very lair of the criminal organizer of the plot. Unaware that the girls have been rescued, the posse is ‘trapped behind enemy lines'.
Born in 1819 at Fort Union in Dakota Territory to a Cree Mother and French Trapper Father, Amos is sent to live with the Brule Sioux at his Mother’s death. When he is thirteen, he leaves his Brule Family to begin a Spirit Quest journey that leads him to a life among White men. As he grows to adulthood, Amos is befriended by a White Rancher who raises the boy as his own, and he witnesses the early days on the Oregon Trail. His new father teaches him the life lessons that lead him to many adventures.
The story of Amos Getting is a compelling historical account of America’s growing pains through the Nineteenth Century, with accounts of battles in the Civil War and the Great Plains Indian Wars. There is the human side of life on the prairie as well, the struggles, hardships, and triumphs that laid the foundation for the land we love today.
Deputy U.S. Marshal Frank Bass faces his most challenging and disturbing case when an old friend, the Chief of Police in Austin, Texas wires to ask for help. A serial killer is at large in the city, terrorizing the populace with grisly murders committed only on the first of each month. His gruesome tactics earn him the name of Annihilator, and he perpetrates his ghastly atrocities only on young female victims.
The Annihilator is as clever as he is mad and revels in bedeviling authorities with cunning misdirection and aliases, taunting them in his joyous insanity. Bass’s investigation is taken from one eerie locale to another in his effort to hunt down the most heinous fiend in the analogs of Texas crime.
Along the way, Bass establishes new kinships and re-establishes an old one, a Pinkerton Detective from a previous case in Texas where he was disguised as an itinerant prospector known as Heeltap. In metropolitan Austin, Bass is exposed to police procedures and new techniques, which are worlds apart from his own area of expertise, law enforcement on the frontier.
This story is based on true accounts of the man author O. Henry dubbed the Servant Girl Annihilator. His crimes against humanity have never been resolved.
Bass, Sally, and baby Lil visit his sister Gracie and her family, the Whitworths, at their new ranch called the Circle W in northern Colorado. Unbeknownst to them, a range war rages in Wyoming just to the north of them, pitting the cattle barons of the Wyoming Territory against the smaller ranchers, farmers, and sheepmen that have come to settle there.
The Wyoming Cattle Growers Association, headquartered in Cheyenne, has hired an army of paid gunmen led by one Tom Horn to show that smaller concerns are encouraged to leave the Territory. Horn and his gang of thugs are deputized by a corrupt sheriff, which makes their actions legal and qualifies them as Regulators rather than vigilantes or gangsters.
Horn and his gang of killers begin a murderous campaign accusing the smaller ranchers of cattle theft with little or no proof. The result is wholesale killings. Hangings of men and women and cold-blooded assassinations of men and boys.
Being close to the border and only a day’s ride from Cheyenne, The Circle W comes under the Regulator's purview. Borders and state lines mean nothing to these villains, and Bass and his sister’s family are soon embroiled in one of the most violent and deadly chapters in frontier history. And Bass makes a lethal enemy along the way.
When cattle thieves outside of Laredo, Texas, shoot down US Deputy Marshal Harold Gosling and his posse, Marshal Frank Bass is called upon to investigate the killings and return the small herd of cattle to their rightful owner, The King Ranch in Southeastern Texas.
The cattle are a result of a breeding experiment that has been several years in the making.
Along the way, Bass encounters conspiracy, treachery, and murder, as well as a villain from his recent past intent on killing Bass, the man who had crippled him in a shootout.