How to describe The Ranger Chronicles?
Imagine if novelist Bernard Cornwell had been born in Texas instead of England. Sharpe meets The Searchers.
Taking his cue from Cornwell's approach to English history, novelist and Texas native David Pyke has created a series of adventure novels about a company of Texas Rangers in the nineteenth century.
Pyke combines the style and pacing of the adventure novels of Cornwell and Clive Cussler with the atmosphere of epic westerns like Forrest Carter's Gone to Texas, Alan LeMay's The Searchers, and James Carlos Blake's Wildwood Boys. Pyke has researched the history, cultures, and geography of Texas to create an authentic setting, but his emphasis is on three-dimensional characters, multiple story lines, and high-energy action sequences.
Like Blake's work, The Ranger Chronicles is violent fiction. It is set in a time dominated by ruthless men, when negotiation was no match for the gun.
The journey begins here...
If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared. -Niccolo Machiavelli
In the gloom of a spring morning in 1840 on the Pecos River in far west Texas, a savage war of revenge is about to explode.
A conscienceless killer named Henry Calhern, a murderer before he was eighteen, an army deserter by twenty-one, and now commander of a band of outlaws known as Comancheros, leads a massive raid on an Apache village, indiscriminately slaughtering men and women for their scalps and abducting children for sale into slavery.
Among the dead is the wife of the village's war chief, Bloody Moon. Standing well over six feet tall, Bloody Moon is an imposing figure of passion and power, and grief and rage warp his reason. His consuming need for vengeance drives him to recklessly pursue Calhern, and he cuts a violent swath through Texas and Mexico - and into the Comancheria. There, he comes into conflict with legendary Comanche chief, Iron Bear. Aging and deeply scarred from a lifetime of battle, Iron Bear is again forced to take up the lance and bow, this time against the Apache invaders.
Into this maelstrom steps seventeen-year-old Silas Grant. Fair-haired, blue-eyed Silas has been taken under the wing of Waldo McCarty, a gregarious barrel-chested bartender who finds Silas a job and a place to live in Austin and entertains the boy with tales of his exploits as a Texas Ranger. Silas's aspiration to become a Ranger is realized when he joins Waldo's ten-man company as they prepare to move against Calhern, an enemy the Texans battled years ago and whom they are still determined to destroy.
Silas faces his fears and self-doubts in a harrowing journey through the rugged Texas landscape, as the quest leads the Rangers into the merciless high desert known as the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains. His romantic ideals are shattered when he kills a man for the first time and sees a close friend die, and before the ordeal ends, Silas will confront the terrible violence of the life he has chosen.
While patrolling the frontier and helping establish a new outpost between Austin and San Antonio, Silas Grant and his Ranger company investigate a series of incidents that is disrupting the delicate alliance between Texas's Anglo and Tejano populations. At the same time, Mexican General Rafael Vasquez leads an army across the Rio Grande toward San Antonio, in hopes of engaging and defeating Texas Ranger Jack Hays.
With no army of its own, Texas's only hope is the Rangers and a few militia, but deteriorating relations among the Texans threaten to fragment their forces as the invading Mexican forces move north.
Texas gains statehood and war with Mexico follows. The American army, without battle-tested cavalry to face the dreaded Mexican lancers, turns to the Rangers as scouts and horse soldiers in the bloody drive to Monterrey.