Oh, those early tv westerns! Laramie. Bonanza. Wagon Train. Gunsmoke. Rawhide. Have Gun Will Travel. They were part of my growing-up years and influenced me as a kid. Influenced me as an author, too. I like a hero with a code of honor. I like it when the bad guys get their comeuppance. I like small towns and prairie views. I know now, after a lot of years and research, that the details of those first westerns were romanticized for public consumption. Those times were rougher and real life was dirtier, which wouldn’t have made great tv, I suppose. But I promise it makes good fiction. At least half a dozen of my books are built around heroic men and remarkable women, small western towns and long prairie views, and enough villain comeuppance to make a meal on. Lily’s Sister, Waiting for Hope, What We Carry With Us, and Surprised by Shadows come to mind.
But maybe the best example of that genre is my The Dangerous Thaw of Etta Capstone, which will be on sale in Amazon’s Kindle store for $.99 from June 12 to June 17. The book is as true to the time as I could make it, with grief and brutality and backbreaking work, with sweat and violence and vengeance and loss all included. But hope, too, and courage and success and tenderness and love. Everything’s there. At one time Amazon threatened to remove the book because there’s a gun on the cover (oh, the horror). But 646 people still gave it a 5-star review, and none (to my knowledge, anyway) was provoked to violent acts by the image of an old six-shooter.
So move out of your comfort zone. Hand over a buck to Amazon. Step back in time to the Piney Woods of 1877 Texas. Meet a good, tough, tender-hearted man. Meet a couple of them, in fact, plus one very, very bad man. And especially, meet Etta Capstone, cooking up her own brand of comeuppance. They’re people you will not soon forget and any one of them is worth more than the dollar you’ll spend.
Go to Hasley’s Book Store at the top of my website and click on the cover of stand-alone novel The Dangerous Thaw of Etta Capstone to be taken directly to the book on Amazon.
Comments 1
Karen Hasley’s books are wonderful reads-all of them. They transport you back to a time we are read and learned about in a way that we can also be a part of. Karen writes with such precision that he each book was hard to put down until it concluded.
Read it!
You won’t be sorry!