Max Brand

In Harrigan, prolific writer Max Brand takes a detour from the dusty trails of the West where his novels were typically set and spins a gripping nautical tale set in Hawaii and upon the open sea. What starts out as a chance meeting between two men turns into a heated race for priceless treasure -- and the love of a remarkable woman.

Carol Ruckdeschel is the wildest woman in America. She eats road kill, wrestles alligators, rides horses bareback, and lives in a ramshackle cabin that she built herself in an island wilderness. She's had three husbands and many lovers, one of whom she shot and killed in self-defense. A combination of Henry David Thoreau and Jane Goodall, Carol is a self-taught scientist who has become a tireless defender of sea turtles on Cumberland Island, a national park off the coast of Georgia. Cumberland is the country's largest and most biologically diverse barrier island - over forty square miles of pristine wilderness celebrated for its windswept dunes and feral horses. Steel magnate Thomas Carnegie owned much of Cumberland, and his widow Lucy made it a Gilded Age playground. But in recent years, Carnegie heirs and the National Park Service have clashed with Carol over the island's future. What happens when a dirt-poor naturalist with only a high-school diploma tries to stop one of the wealthiest families in America?

A Western Story

He was still a young man, but he'd used that handful of years effectively, building a bad reputation that spanned the West, his villainy taking different forms everywhere it took roost. Denver knew him as the Doctor; Texans called him Montana; and folks in Idaho called him Texas. On account of his youth, most everywhere else called him the Lonesome Kid. But when he finally gets arrested for vagrancy, he tells the sheriff his name is Alfred Lamb. Will that identity stick when he tries to help a rancher battle off a pack of cattle rustlers? With a lengthy career in pulps, comics, and early cinema, and with over two hundred full-length Western novels to his credit, including Destry Rides Again and Montana Rides and the iconic Dr. Kildare series, Max Brand's action-filled stories of adventure and heroism in the American West continue to entertain readers throughout the world.

Michael Clovelly might not have been the greatest swordsman ever to come to London town during the reign of the Merry Monarch, Charles the Second, but if a better man ever wielded a blade, he had not yet stepped forth to claim the distinction. Seeking gold with which to elevate his beggarly fortunes, Clovelly chances to encounter a bully, and his fierce swordwork brings him to the attention of Lord Teynham, who has need of a resourceful man with a rapier. The commission: to turn highwayman and rob a certain coach. The reasons? They are both murky and mysterious. But they have to do with a certain lady of impeccable character.... Since his belly is empty, Clovelly dares the hangman's noose for a certain sum of gold-and barges into more strife and intrigue than he bargained for. Max Brand was the personal pen name of Frederick Schiller Faust, one of the most prolific writers who ever lived. The creator of characters as diverse as Whistling Dan Barry, Destry and Dr. Kildaire, Faust specialized in Westerns, but also contributed to other genres. He wrote more that five hundred stories, but Clovelly is one of his rare cloak and sword swashbucklers. Volume #22 in The Argosy Library.