The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories

From a forbidden glance on a Miami night to a killer’s slow burn on a Detroit street, no one mixes passion, scheming, and violence better than Elmore Leonard.  But before he did it in Miami Beach or Motor City, Elmore Leonard did it on the American frontier.

This raw, hard-bitten collection gathers together the best of Leonard’s Western fiction.  In stories that burn with passion, treachery, and heroism, the American frontier comes vividly, magnificently to life.  In “Only Good Ones,” we meet a fine man turned killer in one impossible moment .  .  .  “Saint with a Six-Gun” pits a doomed prisoner against his young guard–in a drama of deception and compassion that leads to a shocking act of courage .  .  .  and in “The Colonel’s Lady,” a brutal ambush puts a woman into the hands of a vicious renegade–while a tracker attempts a rescue that cannot come in time.

Etching a harsh, haunting landscape with razor-sharp prose, Elmore Leonard shows in nineteen brilliant stories why he has become the American poet laureate of the desperate and the bold.