McBride At Rest

McBride At Rest

Monday, October 30, 2017

Halloween and Apaches

Halloween!!!!

I love this day that rolls around about once a year. It’s the day that I can shout out that another McBride novel is for sale on Amazon. That’s today! And in 2017 the day is—October 31---HALLOWEEN!!! Gotcha, didn’t I? J

Trick-or-treating tiny goblins aside, my new story starts in a very Halloween-esque manner with a damned scary meeting between a young newly-wed couple near New Braunfels and a trio of Lipan Apache warriors looking for horses to steal, but perfectly willing to demonstrate their brand of casual savagery when unexpected opportunity presents itself. (I dare not call such a gruesome encounter serendipity)

The new book’s title is A Different Country Entirely and it’s a Texas Ranger novel, quasi-western, quasi-military. It’s the fictional telling of an historical event orchestrated by a cantankerous Texas Ranger captain, James H. Callahan. If you watched the Lonesome Dove TV miniseries, and remember Ranger Captains Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call, you have a fair notion of the real Captain Callahan. While my Apache head bad-ass is not named Blue Duck, I have Wild Cat, a Black-Seminole historical bad-ass who raised some hell in South Texas.

As a result of such ongoing depredations, in 1855, Captain Callahan led 115 mounted volunteers-early Texas Rangers—into the forbidden landscape of northern Mexico to find and punish the Apache Indians who had been raping, murdering, burning, stealing, and sometime simply taking women and children in Texas, and then seeking sanctuary across the Rio Grande, the border separating Texas and Mexico.

Callahan’s expedition never confronted the marauding Apaches, but his young Rangers did cross paths with several hundred Mexican soldiers, with very mixed, very violent results. The real historical story is the exciting core of my more far-reaching personalized retelling and elaboration of the recorded factual expedition. 

Even with a Halloween Book Opening, there are no ghosts or vamps or were-beasts. It is historical fiction about Texas Rangers, after all. But there is a lot of action and a candid look at Texas in 1855, which was not a place for the weak of heart— absolutely A Different Country Entirely.

The paperback for $15 from Amazon would make a Christmas present that will keep someone in your family saying, “What? Sorry, I was reading,” during the holidays. Promise. And there’s a Kindle download for you for $5 so you can be the distracted one. Double Dog Promise.


Here’s the long, but direct, link to the page on Amazon:


I hope you'll take a look on Amazon. Try the "Look Inside" feature for a jump-start about those bad Apaches. You will immediately find yourself in midst of a something that will twist your innards.


No comments:

Post a Comment