Books by Robert Edmond Alter

Here is the exciting biography of one of America's greatest folk heroes, said to have killed 21 men-- one fo each year of his life. The trail of Billy the Kid, traced against the backdrop of one of the bloodiest range wars in the history of the Old West, recreates both the facts and the legend. It follows Billy from the time his family moved out West to the final showdown when his one time friend shot him in cold blood. This is the masterful saga of a boy who might have been one of the bloodiest killers of the West -- or who might have been just a victim of circumstance.

The swamp had no name and no landmarks: just cypress, Spanish moss, and alligators-and a wrecked plane with eighty thousand dollars inside it. The man who found the Money Plane could have any woman he wanted-even the deliriously carnal Dorry Mears-as long as he kept the source of his fortune a secret. But in the swamp no secret was ever safe. And neither was anyone who had Dorry for a mistress.An inspired hybrid of crime fiction and Southern gothic, Swamp Sister is Tobacco Road written in acid and hellfire, populated by the most outrageously venal and benighted characters ever to crawl out of the collective unconscious.

Of all creatures, man is the most difficult to keep caged. There is no textbook on escape, yet every prison, no matter how "escape proof" it is claimed to be, has lost some of its unwilling guests. Here are twelve true tales of men whose ingenuity and determination would not permit them to languish in confinement. Some were famous, some not; some imprisoned justly, some unjustly, but all had that extra measure of human dignity that would not accept chains.

Matt Burnett joins the militia when he hears of pending French and Indian attacks upon colonial settlers. He immediately finds himself regarded as a hero and at the same time a spy-suspect, both situations arising from a series of incidents involving the young Major George Washington.Matt and Chief, his elderly Indian accomplice, begin their adventure by foiling an ambush of Washington. Shortly afterward, Matt is part of the young Washington's first military command. The colonial militia, augmented by British regulars, sets out to intercept a French and Indian invasion.Washington is beset by the resentment of regular British officers at being subordinate to a colonist. He is also hampered by the lack of discipline in his militia, and by the nagging doubt about whether one of the colonials in his command is practicing treachery. The climax comes when the young colonel, abandoned by the British and outnumbered by the enemy, decides to erect a primitive defense which history remembers as Fort Necessity

That's a knife in his chest, just like the kind my ex-wife used to use in her knife-throwing act. But that was a long time ago. Before she married the owner of this carny... And there's the owner now. He's the dead man.CARNY KILL. A mystery from the author of Swamp Sister and The Red Fathom.