They say a railroad is little more than a small town that stretches a thousand miles along a single winding thread. And like any small town, gossip is known to travel up and down the rail so fast it might as well be a telephone party line. So when a local runaway turns up dead sixty miles down track under a bridge marked as a safe hobo camp, it becomes Hook Runyon’s job to find out what happened before it hits the headlines of the local newspapers. The rail yard bull is dealing with the co...

2026 Oklahoma Book Award FinalistHe thought he'd hit rock bottom— until he found a body.Desperate for a job, drowning in debt, and heartbroken, newly graduated Ethan Poser takes a custodial position at the Carnegie Library. But when he chances upon the body of his predecessor in a nearby city park and is implicated in the murder, Ethan's life takes a dangerous turn.Associate librarian Anna Khole detects that the library's rare book collecti...

Railroad bull Hook Runyon and his dog, Mixer, are chasing persistent pickpockets on the Santa Fe line, when Hook is called to investigate a malfunctioning wigwag signal in the middle of nowhere. A young man has been strung up there, hung from the signal, and left strangled to death. Hook finds no identification on the body, other than a bronze hero's medal around the corpse's neck, with the name Samuel Ash engraved on it. Refusing to bury what seems to be a World War II hero in a pauper's ...

*WINNER! 2024 Oklahoma Book Award*Stripped of opportunity by the Great Depression, educated and ambitious Liam takes a low-paying job with the Federal Writers' Project, assigned to collect stories of rural life for the Library of Congress in a hot, poverty-stricken Dust Bowl town in Oklahoma. He' ll take his government check, write the stories, and wait for better times. Then Liam meets a woman who upends all his plans.Eden Sawyer may be poor, but she' s har...

Life couldn’t be worse for archaeology grad student Jim Hunt. Having lost his funding at a major midwestern university, and his partner, he desperately needs a breakthrough to revitalize his work and his life. Could a summer dig in map-dot Lyons, Kansas, jumpstart his fledgling career? Out of options, he packs his bags.Five hundred years earlier, Spanish conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado faces a desperate journey of his own through New World terrain. He must find the legen...

*WINNER! 2020 Spur Award from the Western Writers of America • FINALIST, Oklahoma Book Award*In the restless years after the Civil War, a wounded nation turns west. Caleb Justin, orphaned and aching for purpose, leaves the Ohio River with his closest friend, Joshua Hart, a runaway with more grit than faith. Their plan: to reach Fort Leavenworth and enlist under General Sheridan. But when an old injury ends Caleb' s dream, the two are torn apart— Joshua joins Custer'...

*FINALIST, 2022 Spur Award from the Western Writers of America*Growing up in the rural impoverishment of post-Depression Oklahoma, and surrounded by feuding family factions, free-spirited Jacob Roland hungers for knowledge and a world beyond his reach.But dark forces are growing in Jacob, twisting with the same ruthless, relentless power of a tornado across the Oklahoma prairies. Jacob battles against these aberrant forces, but, trapped by poverty and a grow...

On a fateful day in 1889, the Oklahoma land rush begins, and for thousands of settlers the future is up for grabs. One of those people is Creed McReynolds, fresh from the East with a lawyer’s education and a head full of aspirations. The mixed-blood son of a Kiowa mother and a U.S. Cavalry doctor, Creed lands in Guthrie station, the designated Territorial Capital, where he must prove that he is more than the half-blood kid once driven from his own land.In recounting the precipitous...

A yard dog turns amateur sleuth when a man is killed in a railroad tunnel in this World War II mystery.Near the end of WWII, Hook Runyon, railroad bull, and his dog, Mixer, are sent to the West Salvage Yard in the high desert of Arizona. Not far away is the Johnson Canyon Tunnel. Though remote and ordinary as tunnels go, it is the gateway to the steepest railroad grade in North America and a potential bottleneck for the delivery of war supplies. So vital is this tu...

"Elegantly written . . . a fascinating glimpse of raw passions in an unusual World War II setting that is true to its time and place." —Carolyn Hart, New York Times –bestselling authorThe Yard Dog takes place near the close of World War II, when a large number of Nazi POWs were incarcerated in camps scattered across the prairies of the United States.At Waynoka Divisional Point, near POW Camp Alva, the dis...

After a devastating fire at an insane asylum in California, Hook Runyon has been put in charge of security for a train that is to transport the survivors, alongside the head of the asylum, Dr. Baldwin, the attending doctor, taciturn Dr. Helms, and a self-sacrificing nurse named Andrea, to a new location in Oklahoma. Hook hires a motley crew of WW II veterans to help, and they set out for the new destination. But things go awry on the Insane Train, as several inmates and attendants are foun...

The book provides a collection of cutting-edge, multi-disciplinary research-based chapters on work, workers and the regulation and management of workplace health and safety. Featuring research from Australia, Europe and North America, the chapters traverse important historical examples and place important, emerging contemporary trends, like work in the gig economy, into wider international and historical perspectives. The authors are leading authorities in their fields.The book con...