A portrait of writer Ambrose Bierce and a glimpse of life in 1880s San Francisco mark a mystery in which newspaperman Tom Redmond investigates a series of murders of women, leading him to conspiracies involving the railroads and state politics. Reprint.

Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

HALL, OAKLEY

Mystery

Penguin??Books

Consulted by a wealthy client whose mistress has been scandalously photographed, Ambrose Bierce and his sidekick, Tom Redmond, follow a trail that pits them against a ruthless pornography ring. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.

Ambrose Bierce and the One-Eyed Jacks

Literature & Fiction

United States

World-famous journalist Ambrose Bierce investigates the disappearance of a Hawaiian princess and is plunged headlong into a world of intrigue and mystery surrounding the court of Hawaiian royalty living in San Francisco. By the author of Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades. Reprint.

Ambrose Bierce and the Death of Kings

Ambrose Bierce and the Trey of Pearls

The arrival in San Francisco of three beautiful young suffragists could be linked to the murder of Reverend Divine, a famed advocate of spiritualism, the female vote, and temperance, and Ambrose Bierce and Tom Redmond join forces to investigate a possible dark side to the three girls--free love, a harem, and some of San Francisco's leading citizens with dark pasts to hide. Reprint.

Ambrose Bierce and the Ace of Shoots

In a fifth installment of the series featuring the outspoken newspaperman, Ambrose Bierce and his associate, Tom Redmond, investigate a shooting that has resulted in the death of the star of a famous touring Wild West show, a case involving a vengeful train robber and opium abuse. Reprint.

It’s 1883 in Johnson County, in the old Dakota Territory—a rugged, wide-open landscape of rolling, red earth, prairie, and cattle as far as the eye can see. But the land is closing, the “Beef Bonanza” is ending, and the free-range cattlemen are stuck watching a way of life disappear in a blaze of drought and gunfire. An action-packed western from one of the masters of the genre, Oakley Hall’s The Bad Lands blends roundups and rustlers, whorehouses and land grabs, shoot-outs and the threat of hangings in a tale of the war between the cowboys and the cattle barons. But more than this, it is an elegy to the wild beauty of the badlands before the ranchers moved in, chased off the free-rangers, the trappers, and the tribes, and fenced it all in.

The Bad Lands: A Novel

University of Chicago Press

The Sweeping Novel of a Twentieth-Century California Life Love and War in California tells the story, through the eyes of Payton Daltrey, of the last sixty years of an evolving America. The award-winning author Oakley Hall begins his newest work in 1940s San Diego, where his endearing, wide-eyed narrator must define his identity in terms of self, family, and World War II. As his classmates disappear into the war one by one, he becomes obsessed with abuses of power and embroiled with the charming, dangerous Errol Flynn; with the Red Baiting of the American Legion; with the House Un-American Activities Committee; and with the Japanese interment at Manzanar. Nevertheless, Payton, too, must go to the war, where he is a part of the invasion of Europe and that proving of the American soldier: the Battle of the Bulge. After war's end and time in New York, he returns to California as a writer and a seeker, whose old, long-lost love rises from the ashes to show him who he really is. Hall has been called a "master craftsman" (Amy Tan) with "one of the finest prose styles around" (Michael Chabon), and he has received the PEN Center USA West Award of Honor and the P&amp;W Writers for Writers Award. Coming on the heels of Hall's San Francisco Chronicle bestseller (a reissue of his classic Western, Warlock), Love and War in California is more than a novel about a young boy who grows old. It's about how the passions of youth become the verities of age, and how we evolve as a nation, a country, and a people during times that are all at once turbulent, dangerous, and stirring.

Love and War in California: A Novel

Thomas Dunne Books

The savage, violent saga of the Mexican Revolution and its long, bitter aftermath are the major background of this superb tale of high adventure and romance, spanning the years from 1913 to the present [1975].\nRobert MacBean, son of a wealthy American tycoon and a proud Mexican heiress, had been prospecting in Mexico until the outbreak of revolutionary violence caught up with him and forced him to join his late mother's rebellious vaqueros fighting against the Federal troops. And with them was the beautiful soldadera called Adelita, a young woman of fiery passion and deep revolutionary fervor, who became MacBean's woman.\nThenceforth it was Adelita, Mexico, the Revolution, and MacBean -- though countless bloody engagements, wild triumphs and tragic defeats, swift-changing loyalties and constant dangers. More than once, MacBean left Mexico -- for other wars, to seek a fortune in the oil fields, to make a new life in glittering Southern California high society. But always the power of Adelita called him back -- Adelita and the revolution she both served and symbolized.\nAn especially "personal" novel, this story of Robert MacBean includes his own "photo album," graphic bitter memories of the Adelita and the bloody days of Mexico.

The Adelita

DOUBLEDAY COMPANY

It’s 1883 in Johnson County, in the old Dakota Territory—a rugged, wide-open landscape of rolling, red earth, prairie, and cattle as far as the eye can see. But the land is closing, the “Beef Bonanza” is ending, and the free-range cattlemen are stuck watching a way of life disappear in a blaze of drought and gunfire. An action-packed western from one of the masters of the genre, Oakley Hall’s The Bad Lands blends roundups and rustlers, whorehouses and land grabs, shoot-outs and the threat of hangings in a tale of the war between the cowboys and the cattle barons. But more than this, it is an elegy to the wild beauty of the badlands before the ranchers moved in, chased off the free-rangers, the trappers, and the tribes, and fenced it all in.

Bad Lands

Fawcett

The Morton Street Slasher has been leaving the corpses of his victims around San Francisco's Union Square. On the women's naked bodies are spade playing cards. The city's infamous newspaperman, Ambrose Bierce, blames the rash of murders on his old enemy, the Southern Pacific Railroad. A naive reporter at Bierce's Hornet pursues the case, uncovering conspiracy at every turn. In a fast-paced novel that is a combination of murder mystery, historical fiction, and quirky biography, Oakley Hall draws the reader into 1880s San Francisco and the changing world that was California in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Local and state politics, the exploitation of the Chinese, the power of the mining and railroad barons, and San Francisco's colorful history provide a backdrop for this irresistible thriller. The novel's chapters are introduced by appropriate excerpts from Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary and narrated by the young reporter Tom Redmond. Redmond is interested in the murders because of his attraction to a woman threatened by the Slasher, and Bierce encourages him because of his personal vendetta against the Big Four of the Railroad. Bierce's misogyny is an influence as well, which Hall uses to advantage in portraying the enigmatic journalist. Hall knows his territory and his characters well. The sights and smells of late-nineteenth-century California are cleverly evoked, and the story's key players are refreshingly authentic. Bierce brandishes his famed cynicism with all the aplomb of the sharp-eyed, sharp-witted newspaperman he was. Cameo appearances by such California worthies as Ina Coolbrith and Joaquin Miller add to the novel's historical richness. Intelligent, gripping, and often quite funny, Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades will satisfy any reader who craves adventure, mystery, romance, and fine writing.

Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades: A Mystery Novel

Genre Fiction

University of California Press

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