In the American West of the 1800’s – in the heart of America’s untamed new frontier – lurks an evil force, the Faceless, awaiting its return to power.
Only two men, warriors from two different cultures, can stand together to defeat the evil.
Gabriel Tyler, a reckless gunslinger, and a Native-American shaman, Jonathan Fivehawk, meet when Gabriel, injured during a gun battle, stumbles into Jonathan’s camp one night.
Initially suspicious of each other, Fivehawk dresses Gabriel’s wounds with his medicines and they realise they are both headed in the same direction: Stonetree, once a thriving frontier community, now a ghost town…
BOOK ONE IN THE SUNDOWNERS SERIES.
AUTHOR’S NOTES:
This is the first novel in the Sundowners series and the introduction to the characters of gunslinger Gabriel Tyler and Native American shaman Jonathan Fivehawk; part of my intent with this series was to mingle the excitement of a Wild West setting with some mythological, otherworldly elements in a ‘high adventure’ storyline. Ghost Town sets the tone for the later books by throwing these two mismatched loners together and slowly revealing to them that there are stranger things than they ever could imagine lurking out in the wilderness.
Spoiler Warning! The notes and annotations below give away key story points from Ghost Town.
* If you wondered who I modelled these characters on, my first thoughts for Tyler was that he’d be a cross between Christian Slater and Harrison Ford in their younger years; as for Fivehawk, I always saw him as a youthful Leonard Nimoy….
* The boy Rafe Lukas is named after a character in a roleplaying game from my misspent teens.
* The villain’s first name, Robur, is taken from the baddie in Jules Verne’s novel Master of the World. His surname is a translation of the word ‘dragon’, and also the name of a cave system I once visited in Majorca.
* What, you ask, is a Trebuchet? The French henchman is named after type of medieval siege engine that chucked stones at castle walls.
* Forbeck Pass, one of the towns Doc Harper mentions, is a nod to Matt Forbeck, whose Western Hero was a useful resource book.
* The scene where Tyler builds one gun from the parts of a dozen others is a homage to a similar sequence in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
* Sherrif Haldeman is named after Joe Haldeman, one of my favourite authors.
* The book Targa reads in Drache’s study, the Codex Atlanticus, is one of Leonardo daVinci’s lost notebooks.
