"There is no one quite like Joseph Hansen writing mystery stories these days. Hansen, the celebrated author of twelve novels featuring his gay detective, Dave Brandstetter, and winner of the 1992 Lambda Award for his last novel, A Country of Old Men, here weighs in with five superb stories of detection, all set on the rugged California central coast, where death is as dramatic and unpredictable as the landscape. Here Hack Bohannon, an ex-sheriff, keeps horses he owns, as well as some for other people, and solves crimes on the side. The inspiration for Bohannon came to Hansen, as he says in his graceful introduction to this volume, from his boyhood admiration of such Hollywood cowboys as Ken Maynard, Buck Jones, and Hoot Gibson. "I never lost the hankering to write westerns." He does them with flair and feeling in these long and varied stories, three of them featuring Bohannon and his crew - the grizzled ex-rodeo rider George Stubbs, the young student priest Manuel Rivera, Lieutenant Gerard, and Gerard's attractive young woman deputy, T. Hodges. Along the way the Bohannon gang discover that death can be dramatic and unpredictable. One non-Bohannon story in this collection features an old man in need of help, who fantasizes that Donald, the son he never had, has finally come to him. Or is it fantasy? Another story, "Molly's Aim," concerns the consequences of a passionate attachment one man feels for another, and how it impacts on the life of the story's central character, Molly Byrne, whose life was changed forever by her relationship with one of these men. But you pick your own favorite Joseph Hansen tale from this first-rate collection, stories that are muscled and supple and full of the wisdom and writing magic that this fine author has accumulated over the years."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved