Top 5 Modern Westerns by True West Magazine"Loaded with healthy doses of humor, adventure, and intrigue, populated by a remarkable cast of characters both good and bad and featuring one heck of an electrifying climax is a throwback to the pulp era in the best possible sense." --Owen Laukkanen, bestselling authorBy October 1967... the Summer of Love is history, rock and roll is dark and revolutionary, and people in the small East Texas community of Center Springs want only a quiet life. Unluckily, two years earlier, Anthony Agrioli met newlyweds Cody and Norma Faye Parker in a Vegas casino and heard their enthusiastic descriptions of Center Springs as the perfect place to settle down and raise a family. Now handsome hit man Agrioli and a blonde bombshell full of surprises need a place to hide out and, if possible, duck retribution from his Las Vegas crime boss.Thirteen-year-old Top Parker has what his grandmother, Miss Becky, calls a Poisoned Gift. His dreams, though random and disconnected, always seem to come true. This time Top dreams he's a wagon wheel with spokes converging from all directions. To him, the spokes symbolize that something is coming. And it is--Center Springs will soon become a combat zone when a squad of gangsters arrives. Oddly, they're after something else. Not Agrioli--yet. Add a sheriff crooked as a dog's hind leg, an unsolved murder in the river bottoms, counterfeit money, and a bank robbery to this country-noir Shakespearian comedy, cast it with Wortham's real and sometimes wacky characters including a constable and a judge, and the outcomes become unpredictable.


Reavis Z. Wortham is the critically acclaimed author of the Red River Mysteries set in rural Northeast Texas in the 1960s. As a boy, he hunted and fished the river bottoms near Chicota, the inspiration for the fictional location. He is also the author of a thriller series featuring Texas Ranger Sonny Hawke. He teaches writing at a wide variety of venues including local libraries and writers’ conferences. Wortham has been a newspaper columnist and magazine writer since 1988, and has been the Humor Editor for Texas Fish and Game Magazine for the past twenty-two years. He and his wife, Shana, live in Northeast Texas. Check out his website at www.reaviszwortham.com