Playing a Lone Hand is a collection of short and mid-length fiction that was brought out by Thorndike Press as a large print original in September of 2025. This grouping consists of six stories, four of them published before and the other two new in this presentation. 

The opening story, “White City,” first appeared in Through Western Storms, an anthology published by Lohman Creative in 2024. This story, told through the eyes of a young narrator, has an investigator on the trail of an abducted girl in a tent city that follows the construction of the railroad. After its initial publication, “White City” was a finalist in Best Short Western Fiction in the annual Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Awards.

“Buckskin Trail” first appeared in Blue Is Not the Word / Buckskin Trail, a slim volume published by Speaking Volumes in 2022. This story is about a man who looks for a lost horse and tries to solve the murder of a neighboring rancher. It was a finalist in Best Short Western Fiction in the Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award in 2023.

The third story, “Blood at the Ranch,” appears in this collection for the first time. It is about a young man who learns about a sordid chapter in his father’s past and helps his father deal with it.

“Pearl of Great Price,” the fourth selection, first appeared as an e-book by Sundown Press (Prairie Rose Publications) in 2018 and was then included in John D. Nesbitt Western Double, also by Sundown Press, in 2019. It features a sleuth named Willis Thorne, who comes to a small town in Wyoming in search of a girl who has been abducted from an Indian boarding school. Thorne collaborates with a colleague, Miss Greer, and with a man who runs a trading post and has an insect collection.

The next story in the collection, “Of Emerald Hue,” appears here for the first time and features Willis Thorne, from the previous story. This time he comes to a Wyoming town in search of a rebellious teenage girl who went missing after she came to live with her grandparents. He is on his own in this story, but he meets a woman he thinks he might see later.

“Leaving the Lariat Trail,” the final story and the longest one in this collection, first appeared as an e-book by Sundown Press (Prairie Rose Publications) in 2019 and was then included in John D. Nesbitt Western Double, also by Sundown Press, in 2019. In this novella, Charles Landon tells the story of the deadly difficulties he gets into when he decides he wants to get out of the crooked life of rustling cattle. ”Leaving the Lariat Trail” won the Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award in Best Short Western Fiction in 2020.

I would like to express my appreciation to Thorndike Press for bringing these works together under a single cover. I appreciate the original publishers as well, as they give authors like myself a great opportunity to have our work showcased; but sometimes a single story gets lost, and in the case of the two novellas that were brought out by Prairie Rose Publications, those two works all but disappeared when Prairie Rose closed down its operations after years of doing great things for me and many other writers. Now it is very gratifying to me to have these stories in one place where readers can find them.

Playing a Lone Hand is available at Amazon.

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