Sundown Reckoning
(2026)(The third book in the John Hayes: Texas Ranger Western series)
A novel by Fred Staff and Paul L Thompson
The desert does not forgive mistakes. Texas Ranger John Hayes intends to survive long enough to make sure a killer does not.
Nine days into a brutal pursuit across the Chihuahuan salt flats, Hayes finally reaches the isolated mining camp of Isla de Sal expecting to arrest fugitive murderer Mason Mears. Instead, he finds a camp already collapsing from the inside. The cistern has been destroyed. The mule teams have been slaughtered. One man lies dead in the bunkhouse. And six desperate miners are trapped without water beneath a killing sun while the man responsible sits among them wearing another man’s name.
With forty miles of open desert in every direction, Hayes bars the bunkhouse door and begins a deadly waiting game inside a sealed adobe room where fear, thirst, suspicion, and violence grow worse by the hour. Every man inside knows only one thing for certain: somebody in that room is not walking back out alive.
But John Hayes did not earn his Ranger badge by backing away from hard arithmetic.
Outnumbered, cut off from help, and trapped in a desert kiln with men growing more desperate by the minute, Hayes must hold the room together long enough to put irons on one of the most methodical killers he has ever hunted before the heat, the thirst, or the men themselves tear the whole camp apart.
SUNDOWN RECKONING is a relentless Classic Western packed with brutal desert tension, psychological pressure, frontier violence, and a Texas Ranger forced to deliver justice inside a room where every man is already close to breaking.
Genre: Western
Nine days into a brutal pursuit across the Chihuahuan salt flats, Hayes finally reaches the isolated mining camp of Isla de Sal expecting to arrest fugitive murderer Mason Mears. Instead, he finds a camp already collapsing from the inside. The cistern has been destroyed. The mule teams have been slaughtered. One man lies dead in the bunkhouse. And six desperate miners are trapped without water beneath a killing sun while the man responsible sits among them wearing another man’s name.
With forty miles of open desert in every direction, Hayes bars the bunkhouse door and begins a deadly waiting game inside a sealed adobe room where fear, thirst, suspicion, and violence grow worse by the hour. Every man inside knows only one thing for certain: somebody in that room is not walking back out alive.
But John Hayes did not earn his Ranger badge by backing away from hard arithmetic.
Outnumbered, cut off from help, and trapped in a desert kiln with men growing more desperate by the minute, Hayes must hold the room together long enough to put irons on one of the most methodical killers he has ever hunted before the heat, the thirst, or the men themselves tear the whole camp apart.
SUNDOWN RECKONING is a relentless Classic Western packed with brutal desert tension, psychological pressure, frontier violence, and a Texas Ranger forced to deliver justice inside a room where every man is already close to breaking.
Genre: Western
Used availability for Paul L Thompson's Sundown Reckoning