Edmund Thorne

Trouble in the Rockies

A season of pelts, peril, and the will to survive

• Western
• Adventure
• Historical Fiction

1834. The Rocky Mountains are still American ground in name only. Three independent fur trappers push deep into the high country, chasing a season's fortune in beaver pelts. They are young, stubborn, and too far from help to matter. The spring rivers run fast and cold, and before the first month is out, one man is gone — swept under by a current that does not give back what it takes. The two who remain press on. They work the valleys and ridges, setting traps through long days and longer nights, building a pile of furs that could buy them out of this life for good. But the wilderness does not yield easily. A grizzly attack leaves one man crippled. A raid by an outcast warrior takes the other to the edge of death. And when the first winter storm howls down from the peaks, the two partners must decide how much they are willing to lose. The frontier does not care about your plans. It only cares if you survive. Trouble in the Rockies is a raw, unflinching story of endurance, greed, and the brutal cost of a fortune made in the wild.

Echoes of the Lionheart

One man's crusade for honor becomes a handler's perfect trap.

• Thriller
• Crime Fiction

Declan Gallagher spends his nights in a decaying northern town reading about Richard the Lionheart and the Knights Templar. At twenty-one, he is bitter, isolated, and convinced that crime, urban decay, and institutional apathy are eroding England beyond repair. So he forms a street patrol. Just a few men walking the alleys, watching the estates. A civic protection initiative, he calls it. Nobody questions a young man who wants to clean up his neighborhood. But Declan is not cleaning. He is recruiting. His brutal interventions go viral, attracting two hardened allies: Callum MacLeod, a Scottish street strategist who drills discipline into the ranks, and Liam Doherty, a Northern Irish contraband courier who spots the subtle signs that nothing about their operation is organic. Together they forge the Lionheart Vanguard, a cross-border alliance of angry men who believe they are fighting for something ancient and noble. They are not. Martin Ward, a veteran intelligence handler with national counter-terrorism, has been watching from the start. He does not want to arrest them. He wants to aim them. By the time Declan realizes his crusade is a manufactured conspiracy, federal tactical teams are already closing in on a government complex in Leeds. The chivalric dream is dead. What remains is a bloody fight for survival across industrial ruins and rail freight depots—against the very machine that built them.

The Gallows Tide

One choice. A thousand dead men. One reckoning.

• Adventure
• Thriller
• Historical Fiction

He sold his soul to save his skin. Now it's time to collect. When Michael Bundy's merchant ship is taken by the brutal pirate captain Barnaby Pryce, he watches his shipmates butchered one by one. Facing the same fate, he makes a choice that will haunt him forever: he takes the pirate oath and becomes one of them. Aboard the warship Sea Wolf, Bundy learns the savage business of outlaw survival. He steals. He kills. He watches innocent men drown. And he remembers every single face. But beneath his mask of loyalty, Bundy is nursing a secret: a cold, patient vow to destroy the man who took everything from him. Through mutiny, betrayal, and a bloody struggle for command, he rises through the ranks until he finally has the ship and the crew to hunt his former captain. The reckoning at sea is thunderous. And when the smoke clears, Bundy has become exactly what he once despised. Now, with a price on his head and the gallows waiting, he faces one last truth: revenge is a voyage that only ends one way.

A PLACE AT THE TABLE

Two families, one table, and the home they start to build

• Romance

Hannah Carver has just leased a modest cottage in Ponderosa Grove and a job at the physical therapy clinic. Her wedding to Adam Ramsey is set for April. Two hours of highway still sit between their everyday lives. Then Adam suggests something simple: one Thanksgiving meal in the church fellowship hall, both families in the same room, and their engagement announced in person. Nothing about blending the quiet, structured Carvers with the large, last-minute Ramseys stays simple. Guest lists swell. Stuffing recipes collide. Seating charts become negotiations. An unexpected visitor, a furnace that dies on Thanksgiving morning, and a dozen well-meant opinions test the couple more than the holiday itself. Hannah and Adam learn how to speak as partners, draw kind lines with extended family, and decide what their own table will look like. Warm, funny, and full of small-town heart, A Place at the Table is a contemporary romance about found family, first holidays, and the courage it takes to make a home that belongs to both of you.

The Long Road to Mesilla

• Western
• Historical Fiction
• Adventure

The war is over. The country ahead may prove harder than the one behind. New Mexico Territory, 1866. Former Union sergeant Matt Keene is headed west looking for honest work when an Apache attack scatters his party and leaves him alone on foot. Miles away, former Confederate cavalryman Luke Bell loses his horse under fire and finds himself hunted across the same hard country. Their trails meet in a rocky shelter with Apache riders somewhere behind them and little reason for either man to trust the other. Keene knows infantry fighting and how to hold bad ground. Bell knows horses, tracks, and the dry country. Between them they have some water, a few weapons, and no easy way out. The men following them are patient, experienced, and in no hurry to close the distance. Keene and Bell must move by night, search for water, nurse failing horses, ration ammunition, and choose ground carefully enough to stay alive. Every mile south brings another wound, another hard decision, and less room for mistakes. Mesilla lies somewhere ahead. Reaching it will take everything two former enemies still have left.

The Drummond Resolve

A West Texas Revenge and Redemption Novel

• Western
• Historical Fiction
• Crime Fiction

Six years in a Texas penitentiary can change a man. Caleb Drummond comes home determined not to waste the years he has left. Framed for the murder of a trusted family friend, Caleb lost his freedom at twenty-three. By the time he returns to West Texas, both of his parents are dead, the woman he once expected to marry has built another life, and the family ranch has fallen into the hands of Charles Conway, a powerful cattleman with good reason to keep the past buried. Caleb soon discovers that clearing his name will take more than a gun. Old survey records are missing. A witness was paid to lie. His own defense attorney has secrets he spent six years drinking to forget. And the land his father lost may have been taken by methods that will not stand up once the right men begin looking closely. So Caleb sends word to Montana. The Drummonds do not gather lightly. But when family comes, they bring ranchers, riflemen, a lawyer, a financier, miners, woodsmen, and men who know hard country from Texas to the northern border. Together they will have to uncover what Conway built his empire on without becoming the kind of men Caleb was accused of being. The Drummond Resolve is a traditional Western of family loyalty, hard-earned justice, dangerous men, and the long work of reclaiming a life after everything familiar has been taken away.

The True Line

• Western
• Historical Fiction

New Mexico Territory, late 1880s. Harlan Voss came west expecting to settle a boundary dispute, dispose of a tract of land he had accepted years earlier in payment of a debt, and move on. Nearing fifty, he has spent most of his life judging land, livestock, money, and men—and he has learned to trust that judgment. Then he finds a survey line that has been moved. Near the disputed boundary lies promising mineral ground, and Benjamin Stark already knows enough about it to want Harlan’s property badly. Stark is no common thief. He has built ranches, freight interests, and a reputation through years of legitimate work. But somewhere along the way, ambition taught him that a useful piece of ground mattered more than the rights of the man who owned it. What begins with old records, altered filings, and a generous purchase offer soon draws Harlan into a fight involving water, ranch land, hidden survey evidence, and men willing to use violence to keep the truth buried. Harlan is accustomed to trusting his own judgment. This time, he will misjudge both an honest man and a dishonest one—and before the true boundary can be established, those mistakes will cost blood. A traditional Western of disputed land, gold, loyalty, and the hard consequences of ownership.

The Freight Road

• Western
• Historical Fiction
• Adventure

New Mexico Territory, 1882. The mine at Silver Basin is losing ground to water, and a replacement pump casting must reach the settlement before winter closes the mountain road. Wagon master Owen Rourke takes six freight wagons north from the railhead with thirty-six mules, mine supplies, blasting powder, and a cast-iron pump casting weighing nearly two tons. The route is long and unforgiving: flooded crossings, washed road, steep grades, failing wagon gear, and weather moving down from the high country. Every delay costs the mine time, but pushing tired animals or damaged wagons too hard can cost the entire outfit. Owen has spent years learning when to press a team and when to stop, what a road will bear, and which men can be trusted when the work turns difficult. He will need all of it to get the freight into Silver Basin—and then get his people home before winter shuts the road behind them. The Freight Road is a traditional historical Western about hard country, practical skill, and the men and women whose work kept frontier towns alive.

The Trail to Bear Springs

• Western
• Historical Fiction
• Adventure

New Mexico Territory, 1879. Fifteen-year-old Luke Redding knows horses, rifles, cattle, and hard country. None of it is enough to save his family when a small band of renegade raiders strikes their isolated ranch. Left for dead beneath the wreckage, Luke wakes to find his parents and younger brother gone and his sister Hannah missing. The riders who discover him the next morning are not rescuers. They are a Navajo pursuit party already hunting the same raiders for attacks of their own. Luke has a horse, a Winchester, and a choice. He can remain behind—or keep up. The trail eventually carries him to Fort Wingate at Bear Springs, where he finds Hannah safe and discovers that surviving is only the beginning. With winter coming and no ranch to return to yet, Luke earns his keep in the post stables and freight yard under veteran teamster Nick Turner. There he learns a different kind of frontier work: mules, harness, wagons, water, freight, and the judgment to know when action matters—and when it does not. By spring, Luke is riding the freight road as a paid hand. But old tracks have crossed that road too, and some unfinished trouble is waiting in the broken country ahead. The Trail to Bear Springs is a traditional historical Western of survival, hard-earned judgment, and a boy learning to carry responsibilities larger than himself.

Hidden in the Jungle

A desperate explorer discovers that some treasures are better left buried in the dark

• Fantasy
• Adventure

Gold is the ultimate bait, and the Amazon is the ultimate trap. Soren Lundgaard is a man with nothing left to lose. Ruined by gambling debts and desperate to reclaim his family name, the Danish cartographer leads a ragtag expedition into the deepest, most treacherous corners of the South American jungle. His goal: The Temple of the Screaming Sun, a place whispered about in legends and feared by every local tribe. Guided by a tribal scout who warns of ancient curses and pursued by a fanatical exile intent on blood sacrifice, Soren’s journey is a descent into madness. The jungle is no mere backdrop; it is a living, breathing predator that hungers for the souls of the greedy. As his crew falls to supernatural horrors and internal treachery, Soren must face a terrifying reality: the temple isn't a treasury—it’s a prison. In this heart-pounding tale of survival and obsession, Edmund Thorne explores the thin line between ambition and insanity. When the gold finally glitters in the darkness, Soren will have to decide if his life is worth more than the fortune he’s died a thousand deaths to find.

The Cabin Boys Adventure

One boy, a forgotten island, and the brutal cost of survival on the high seas

• Adventure
• Thriller
• Historical Fiction

Fourteen-year-old Tommy Penhaligon was a mere cabin boy when the HMS Sovereign set sail to spy on the Spanish Crown. He expected the harsh discipline of the British Navy, but he never anticipated the total destruction of his world. When a catastrophic hurricane tears his ship asunder, Tommy is cast away on a desolate Caribbean island. He is the sole survivor, left with nothing but a rusted blade and the instincts he sharpened under a stern captain. But the island is far from empty. Between the arrival of ruthless pirates, predatory slavers, and even darker threats, Tommy must learn that survival requires a different kind of steel. For two long years, the boy he once was dies, and a hardened warrior is forged in the shadows of the reef. Alongside an unlikely ally, Tommy wages a silent, desperate war against those who would hunt him. As the line between civilization and savagery blurs, he faces a final choice: stay a victim of the tide or become the master of the mist. Edmund Thorne delivers a visceral historical epic about the loss of innocence and the enduring power of the human spirit.