They said Lorn Chambers packed death in his black holsters. But Chambers was a relic from the past, the last of the great gunfighters. All the others were dead or had hung up their guns, trying to change with the times. Chambers turned his back on the future and rode off into the western wasteland, looking for what was left of the past. What he found was some vicious killers from his own past. They had robbed and murdered his parents years before and planned to kill Chambers before he could kill them.
Warning: Reading a Van Holt western may make you want to get on a horse and hunt some bad guys down in the Old West. Of course, the easiest and most enjoyable way to do it is vicariously—by reading another Van Holt western.
Van Holt writes westerns the way they were meant to be written.
Death in Black Holsters
Mrs. Tuesday’s Departure
SECOND EDITION – FULLY REVISED AND EDITED!
A heart-wrenching historical novel spanning seventy years, two continents, and a an imagined story that holds the power to create a safe future for a young girl. This page-turning family saga soars to a breathtaking ending that redefines the meaning of love.
When Natalie and Anna, sisters and life-long rivals, hide an abandoned child from the Nazis, their struggle re-opens a star-crossed love triangle, threatening their safety and testing the bonds of their loyalty.
Hungary’s fragile alliance with Germany insured that Natalie, a best selling children’s book author, and her family would be safe as World War Two raged through Europe. The Holocaust that has only been whispered about until now becomes a terrible reality for every Jewish family or those who hide Jews.
Beautiful but troubled Anna, a poet and university professor is losing her tenuous hold on reality, re-igniting a dangerous sibling rivalry that began in childhood.
The streets of Budapest echo with the pounding boots of Nazi soldiers. Danger creeps to the doorstep where the sisters’ disintegrating relationship threatens to expose the child they are trying to protect. In one night, Anna’s rash behavior destroys their carefully made plans of escape, and Natalie is presented with a desperate choice.
Interwoven with Natalie and Anna’s story, is Mila’s. The abandoned child whose future Natalie lovingly imagines in a story about an old woman named Mrs. Tuesday.
Mrs. Tuesday’s Departure is an inspirational historical novel spanning two generations and exploring the un-breakable bonds of sisters.
The Long Trail
The long trail means death in the Old West. But it’s a long and dangerous trail that Ben Russell must follow in his search for the men who murdered his father. Then it’s that other long trail for the killers when they go down before his blazing gun—the long trail to hell.
Van Holt’s hellbound gunslingers always send the bad guys where they belong. It just isn’t safe for them anywhere in the Old West anymore.
Of course, the gunsters and punksters of our own time will feel a lot safer when the government disarms their victims and those who might be able to protect them if they weren’t afraid they would get in more trouble than the perpetrators.
Double Click
Fans of the romantic hit Click: An Online Love Story will enjoy another voyeuristic dive into the lives of Renee, Shelley, Ashley, Mark and Ethan, as Double Click picks up with their lives six months later. Are Renee and Ethan soul mates? Does Mark ever go on a date? Has Shelley run out of sexual conquests in Los Angeles? Will Ashley’s judgmental nature sabotage her budding relationship?
Through a marriage proposal, wedding, new baby and unexpected love twist, Double Click answers these questions and more. Readers will continue to cheer, laugh, cry and cringe following the email exploits of Renee and friends.
Click: An Online Love Story
Fast approaching her 30th birthday and finding herself not married, not dating, and without even a prospect or a house full of cats, Renee Greene, the heroine of Click: An Online Love Story, reluctantly joins her best guy pal on a journey to find love online in Los Angeles.
The story unfolds through a series of emails between Renee and her best friends (anal-compulsive Mark, the overly-judgmental Ashley and the over-sexed Shelley) as well as the gentlemen suitors she meets online. From the guy who starts every story with “My buddies and I were out drinking one night,” to the egotistical “B” celebrity looking for someone to stroke his ego, Renee endures her share of hilarious and heinous cyber dates. Fraught with BCC’s, FWD’s and inadvertent Reply to All’s, readers will root for Renee to “click” with the right man.
I’m here to help
It had all seemed so right at the time, Sharon realized with a shudder.
Long ago she had made a collection of tiny and innocent decisions that had precipitated a most profound and unpredictable outcome.
Minutes ago her seventeen-year-old daughter, Renita had stumbled upon the subtle inconsistencies of her birth while completing some college applications. Now she waited reproachfully for Sharon to explain the discrepancies.
It was clearly the time, Sharon brooded uneasily, when she would have to finally disclose to her daughter both the laudable good deeds and the lamentable oversights that had led them to the current situation.
S F Chapman has cleverly crafted I’m here to help as a social commentary in the form of an often poignant literary novella.
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WARNING: This book contains graphic content that may be objectionable to some readers.
Alma Harper has been trying to forget what happened in Widowsfield 16 years ago. She has a good life as a music teacher now, and might rekindle her relationship with her one true love. However, the number 314 haunts her, and threatens to bring her back to the day that her brother disappeared. When a reporter shows up, just days before March 14th, Alma realizes that her past is coming back to haunt her. What happened on March 14th, at 3:14, 16 years ago? No one but The Skeleton Man can remember.
Take Me Home
When Josie Wolcott finds herself with an empty nest and another failed romantic relationship, she sets off in search of herself on a uniquely American adventure that takes the reader across the country.
Leaving her New England home in her rearview mirror, Josie’s journey of self-discovery begins in South Florida where every day feels like a vacation. While enjoying the waterfront bars with their countless happy hours, she begins to question her relationship with alcohol and what it is she truly wants out of life. Determined to find her way, she decides to take on a new challenge at a fishing lodge along the Snake River in southeastern Idaho where she meets Dr. Andrew Radcliffe, a kindred spirit navigating his own way to happiness.
From the Northeast to Florida and the great American West, Josie meets a cast of characters as varied and different as the landscape she travels through. With an adventurous spirit and a willing heart, she confronts her demons and past mistakes and dares to find happiness in the most unexpected of places. Will Josie, a lifelong wanderer, find the road that finally takes her home?
An Embarrassment of Riches
When Ursula Barnett and her husband Jed win the Irish lottery, they think their troubles are over. But they are just beginning. Ursula coerces her Yank husband to retire in her hometown of Derry, Northern Ireland, hoping to atone for her youthful sins as a collaborator with the IRA in the 1970s. At the first sniff of Ursula s lotto win, however, her chronically greedy sister-in-law Fionnuala Flood rallies the family against Ursula.
Fionnuala’s life is a misery. She is married to a boozing fish-packing plant worker and raising seven seedy hooligans, from a convict son to an eight-year-old devil-daughter who will resort to desperate measures to secure the perfect Holy Communion gown. Between two part-time jobs, Fionnuala still finds the energy to put into motion plans which pit husbands against wives, daughters against mothers, the lawless against the law and Fionnuala against anyone fool enough to cross her path.
Family saga and black comedy, love story and courtroom drama, An Embarrassment of Riches will take you on a journey to Northern Ireland and beyond, where Protestants and Catholics wage battle daily, and where crossing family with finance leads to heartache and hilarity, passion and tragedy.
Red Clover
Imagine feeling like an outsider. Now imagine feeling like an outsider in your own family.
Evanston, Illinois. Lee Oliver Winekoop is born into extreme wealth, but despite his near genius IQ, he doesn?t have the resourcefulness to realize any of its benefits. His mother?s passive parenting style and frequent absences from their lakefront mansion leave him in the care of nannies as a child even when she?s home, making Lee feel unwanted and alone. Further undermining his self-worth is his father?s inexplicable contempt toward him. If Lee only knew why his parents disliked him so, he would fix whatever it was he was doing wrong, and remove the invisible barrier that keeps him from fitting in.
Lee wants nothing more than to be like his two older brothers—successful at everything they do, sons who make their parents proud—even if it means buying into the family?s philosophy that money is the answer to one?s success in life.
In the thick of Lee?s discontent, his mother?s favorite uncle dies and leaves him a sizable inheritance—an inheritance with some bizarre strings attached. But as soon as he tries to start using it to mold an identity for himself, his world is turned upside-down when he learns shocking family secrets—causing him to rethink who he is and where he?s going.
Readers will find Lee?s reinvention of himself on his journey into manhood surprising; the roadblocks he confronts unnerving; and the cast of characters he befriends along the way both heartwarming and amusing.
Divas of Damascus Road
After being blamed for her baby sister’s death, Dianne Rucker swore she’d never come back to Dentonville, Texas. But her Aunt Gloria, who took her in after the accident, is getting remarried. Going back home means Dianne must face her own demons as well as a drug-addicted mother who is now falling even further into schizophrenia.
But Dianne isn’t the only one struggling. Her two cousins must come to terms with their own issues after having grown up in this dysfunctional family of women. And Aunt Gloria may be hiding the biggest skeletons of all.
The women must look to their faith in God as they attempt to turn their lives around like Saul on the Biblical road to Damascus.