Broken Horn is my thirty-seventh western/frontier novel. I wrote it in the summer of 2024, and it was published in February 2025 as an e-book and paperback by Wolfpack Publishing. It is the second novel in a three-book series featuring Jess Delaine.

In Broken Horn, Jess Delaine responds to a request from a Mexican family in Overton (scene of the first Delaine novel), friends of Delaine’s girlfriend, Rachel Valera. The family is concerned because the husband and father for the family went to another town to settle the inheritance of an uncle who died, and the family hasn’t heard anything from the man.

Delaine goes to the town of Harrow, a couple of days’ ride north and a little west. He has a presentiment that he should not disclose his purpose, so he takes a job at a ranch and makes his inquiries in an inconspicuous way. He hears of a dead man who was found by the railroad in a neighboring town, and he infers that it may be the missing heir from Overton. Rachel comes to town to tell Delaine in person that that the deceased uncle was lending money to a prominent landowner, who in turn was paying off somebody for some kind of blackmail. Rachel and Delaine find a box of promissory notes in the deceased uncle’s lodging house, and Delaine leaves the box with a disinterested party. 

Now Delaine has to figure out what the connection is—who was blackmailing the prominent rancher and why. As in other Delaine stories, he goes to the lower socio-economic classes and learns some sordid information. Along the way, the blackmailer is found dead, and then the wreck of a woman who was a key informant is also found dead.

Meanwhile, another plot strand has become evident in which more than one person is interested in the reward for a missing boy from Billings, Montana. Somewhat early on in the planning for this series, I decided what kinds of crimes the main character would deal with. I settled in the general area of missing persons, kidnapped persons, and human trafficking.

Delaine, the amateur sleuth, finds missing details and makes the connections. At the end of the story, he tells one of his acquaintances, a boy who makes a living with his donkey, that he, Delaine, is just like this boy in the street,. The boy asks, “Are you a Pinkerton man?” and Delaine answers, “No, Dan. I’m a regular citizen, like you.” With this ending, I underscore an idea that I work with in some of my stories, that a regular citizen (in contrast with the larger-than-life heroes that are extolled in various kinds of fiction) can solve problems and help achieve justice.

As part of my preparation for writing this novel, I did some background reading. Some of these connections are perhaps a bit abstract and distant, but I, at least, found some common ground in reading Les Misérables, Oliver Twist (my second reading after more than fifty years), and a handful of works by Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Jim Thompson, and Tony Hillerman (three of which I had read before but a while back). I also read a couple of memoir works on homesteading and ranching in Wyoming.

As another part of my preparation, I went on a field trip to observe the kind of country in which the story would take place. This time, I went to an area between Lusk and Shawnee, and north of Lost Springs, all in Wyoming, north and west of where I have my retreat where I sometimes stay on field trips. I spent two nights at my place and toured the country in the meanwhile. I found an area that I had not used for a story but that was close to other towns and locales I had used. As I sometimes do, I changed the names of the places so that I could manage locations for my story purposes, and I used fictionalized names for Lusk and Manville that I had used before. As noted in my comments on Lost Canyon, Wolfpack Publishing has been very good to work with on this series as well as on other work of mine. I hope this novel and the others in this series meet with success.

Broken Horn is available at Amazon.

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