Elmore Leonard: The Tonto Woman and other Western Stories (UK 2000)

From the Publisher:
Bonnet said, 'We're gonna drag you so you'll know the ground and never cross this land again.' And Ruben Vega said, because he had no choice, 'I hear the rope in the air, the one with the rifle is dead. Then you. Then the roper.' His words drew silence because there was nothing more to be said. A world of deadly silences, heat, mescal and sudden violence; of greenhorn deputies and hard-bitten veterans. Where life is for living because danger is ever-present. This is the world that Elmore Leonard, undisputed master of the modern thriller, conquered before taking to the mean streets of Miami and Detroit. Here, then, are nineteen nuggets of pure storytelling gold from the hard-packed ground of the Old West. Taut, spare and thrilling, these are stories that don't take prisoners.

Elmore Leonard: The Tonto Woman and other Western Stories. Penguin Books, ISBN: 0140277153; (October, 2000), 352 p., £6.99.

Elmore Leonard: The Tonto Woman and other Western Stories (USA 1998)

From the Publisher:
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.

The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories is a raw, hard-bitten collection that 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 "The Tonto Woman," a young wife, her face tattooed by Indian kidnappers, becomes society's outcast -- until an outlaw vows to set her free... 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... 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... and in "Blood Money," five bank robbers are being picked off one by one, but one man believes he can make it out alive.

The wild and glorious spirit of the West comes alive in the hands of America's greatest storyteller. 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.

Elmore Leonard: The Tonto Woman and other Western Stories. Delacorte, ISBN: 0385323867 (September, 1998), 345 p., $23.95.