Adam Steele 41: The Killing Strain

Trail's End, it was called. Not the sort of place to end up: land abandoned, ownership obscure, farmstead falling down, no crops, no stock.But to Adam Steele it looked like it might be the road to the future. Spread out along the Californian foothills of the High Sierras, he could see it as a thriving horse ranch, and him thriving with it.But when he woke up to uninvited house guests standing over him, one covering him with a rifle and the other, the one with the baseball bat, aiming to turn Steele's head into a Virginia hamburger, it was the present that was mostly on his mind. GEORGE G. GILMAN (11 December 1936 - 23 January 2019) was a pseudonym created and used by the near-legendary Terry Harknett -- is so well-known to western readers for his Edge and Steele books, that he hardly needs any introduction. Arguably the most influential British western writer of the last 50 years, his tough, graphic, wise-cracking westerns are still in demand, even though almost twenty years have now passed since the last one was published. The success of Edge led George G. Gilman to create a companion series featuring a shorter, greyer and somewhat milder (though no less murderous) anti-hero: ADAM STEELE. Steele's life, as that of his forerunner, is changed dramatically and forever at the end of the War. In The Violent Peace (1974) he embarks upon a vengeance hunt when his father, wrongly suspected of being a rebel sympathiser, is lynched in the aftermath of President Lincoln's assassination. In the process he's forced to kill his best friend, a marshal, and in turn becomes a wanted man himself. The story was based upon an unfilmed screenplay that Harknett wrote for a producer who had been unable to buy the movie rights to the Edge series.