Other editions of book Tangled Trails A Western Detective Story

Set in Wyoming and Colorado, this is the story of cattleman and a rodeo star named Kirby Lane. Kirby is trying to help Rose McLean and her pregnant, single sister Esther. The father is Kirby's uncle and it isn't long before the man is murdered. Kirby is both a suspect and the detective in this thriller, with plenty of twists and turns before the surprise ending.

Excerpt:"The young cattleman had seen more than once the tragedies of the range. He had heard the bark of guns and had looked down on quiet dead men but a minute before full of lusty life. But these had been victims of warfare in the open, usually of sudden passions that had flared and struck. This was different. It was murder, deliberate, cold-blooded, atrocious. The man had been tied up, made helpless, and done to death without mercy. There was a note of the abnormal, of the unhuman, about the affair. Whoever had killed James Cunningham deserved the extreme penalty of the law."

Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story is presented here in a high quality paperback edition. This popular classic work by William MacLeod Raine is in the English language, and may not include graphics or images from the original edition. If you enjoy the works of William MacLeod Raine then we highly recommend this publication for your book collection.

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

What do Westerns and detective stories have in common? Quite a lot, if you ask pioneering author and frontier lawyer William MacLeod Raine. In Tangled Trails, Raine brings together the best of both genres in an engaging mystery that unfolds in the wide open spaces of the Old West. “Take the love affairs of a Montana ranger and a charming Wild Rose who walks like ‘a young Greek goddess in the dawn of the wold’ and you have a Western love story. Take a murder, with half a dozen people equally to be suspected, with a mysterious Oriental meeting an untoward and baffling end, and the murdered man’s attractive nephew pursuing and finding the real criminal, whose villainy is so well concealed that the reader does not discern it until the author wishes and you have a mystery story.” -Boston Transcript “A William MacLeod Raine thriller. Its narrative literally flashes through three hundred pages of breathless excitement and mystery.” -Boston Transcript “Mr. Raine proves that he can spin a detective yarn with the best of them.” -New York Times

Esther McLean brought the afternoon mail in to Cunningham. She put it on the desk before him and stood waiting, timidly, afraid to voice her demand for justice, yet too desperately anxious to leave with it unspoken. He leaned back in his swivel chair, his cold eyes challenging her. "Well," he barked harshly. She was a young, soft creature, very pretty in a kittenish fashion, both sensuous and helpless. It was an easy guess that unless fortune stood her friend she was a predestined victim to the world's selfish love of pleasure, and fortune, with a cynical smile, had stood aside and let her go her way. "I . . . I . . ." A wave of color flooded her face. She twisted a rag of a handkerchief into a hard wadded knot. "Spit it out," he ordered curtly. "I've got to do something . . . soon. Won't you—won't you—?" There was a wail of despair in the unfinished sentence. James Cunningham was a grim, gray pirate, as malleable as cast iron and as soft. He was a large, big-boned man, aggressive, dominant, the kind that takes the world by the throat and shakes success from it. The contour of his hook-nosed face had something rapacious written on it.