Broken Frontier

For bestselling writer Jeff Mariotte, 2007's Western Extravaganza begins on January 17 with the release of Desperadoes: Buffalo Dreams #1, launching a four-issue miniseries of that critically acclaimed western/horror comic book, with art by Alberto Dose (Flash).  The four issues ship monthly from IDW Publishing.

Additionally, the first Desperadoes miniseries, A Moment's Sunlight, with artwork by John Cassaday, has just become available online, in PDF form, at PullboxOnline.com.

“I love the American west,” Mariotte said.  “The history, the natural beauty, the people.  My neighbors are ranchers and cowboys, and my place is smack between Tombstone and Skeleton Canyon, where Geronimo's surrender ended the longest war in American history.  I could hardly live here and not write about the west.”

Desperadoes is just the start of a year dominated by work involving the western genre.  In March, Hachette Books will release DC Universe: Trail of Time, a novel teaming Superman, the Phantom Stranger and the Demon with DC Comics western heroes Jonah Hex, Bat Lash, Scalphunter, and El Diablo, and including a cameo by yet another classic DC western character.

April brings Las Vegas: Sleight of Hand, the second novel based on the NBC/Universal TV series Las Vegas.  In this novel, western fever grips the Montecito as a cowboy event called Stampede! takes place there, including a major trade show, rodeo, and the theft of a particularly western…substance…turns the casino upside-down.

In May, Missing White Girl, an original supernatural thriller, will be a major release from Jove Books.  In this novel, a rural Arizona Sheriff's office has to deal with a multiple homicide/kidnapping when all the local law enforcement resources are devoted to a high-profile media circus case involving a missing white girl.  Sheriff's lieutenant and rancher Buck Shelton discovers that the case has a supernatural component that reaches back through time to the earliest European explorers of the American southwest.

Later in the year, Kensington Books will publish Lost Trails, a western short story anthology of “untold stories” of real western figures, containing work by some of the masters of the genre, including Louis L'Amour and Elmer Kelton.  Jeff Mariotte has a story about notorious killer John Wesley Hardin in the anthology called “The Ones He Didn't Talk About.”

Other releases will be announced as they become scheduled.  It's safe to say that Mariotte is one of the busiest writers west of the Pecos.

Jeff Mariotte, a member of the Western Writers of America, owns the Flying M Ranch in Arizona's historic Cochise County, on land that once belonged to the vast Erie Cattle Company.