River Of Chains
(2026)(The fourth book in the John Hayes: Texas Ranger Western series)
A novel by Fred Staff and Paul L Thompson
The Sabine belonged to Arthur Ludwig. John Hayes intended to take it back.
When Texas Ranger John Hayes arrives in the drowned timber country along the Sabine River carrying a federal warrant for river baron Arthur Ludwig, he finds an empire built on fear, chain booms, stolen tolls, and murdered lawmen. Ludwig controls the river from the Louisiana line to the upper logging camps, and every man trying to work those waters answers to him or disappears into the swamp.
But Hayes did not come to bargain.
Moving through flooded cypress brakes, hidden logging camps, and river channels watched night and day by armed patrols, Hayes begins tearing apart Ludwig’s operation one piece at a time. Along the way he finds starving rivermen, terrified camp workers, and the remains of a sheriff left chained to a wrecked patrol boat as a warning to every lawman who might come after him.
Now the Sabine is rising with rain, Ludwig’s gunmen are closing in from every direction, and the river itself is turning into a battlefield of shattered log booms, drifting timber, blackwater ambushes, and blood-debt that cannot be left unpaid.
JOHN HAYES: RIVER OF CHAINS is a hard-country Western filled with flooded river bottoms, timber warfare, outlaw river empires, brutal frontier justice, and a Texas Ranger determined to break the men who turned the Sabine into their own private kingdom.
Genre: Western
When Texas Ranger John Hayes arrives in the drowned timber country along the Sabine River carrying a federal warrant for river baron Arthur Ludwig, he finds an empire built on fear, chain booms, stolen tolls, and murdered lawmen. Ludwig controls the river from the Louisiana line to the upper logging camps, and every man trying to work those waters answers to him or disappears into the swamp.
But Hayes did not come to bargain.
Moving through flooded cypress brakes, hidden logging camps, and river channels watched night and day by armed patrols, Hayes begins tearing apart Ludwig’s operation one piece at a time. Along the way he finds starving rivermen, terrified camp workers, and the remains of a sheriff left chained to a wrecked patrol boat as a warning to every lawman who might come after him.
Now the Sabine is rising with rain, Ludwig’s gunmen are closing in from every direction, and the river itself is turning into a battlefield of shattered log booms, drifting timber, blackwater ambushes, and blood-debt that cannot be left unpaid.
JOHN HAYES: RIVER OF CHAINS is a hard-country Western filled with flooded river bottoms, timber warfare, outlaw river empires, brutal frontier justice, and a Texas Ranger determined to break the men who turned the Sabine into their own private kingdom.
Genre: Western
Used availability for Paul L Thompson's River Of Chains