True Bowen was out hunting when the Comanche warriors attacked. Quicker 'n death, they killed his folks, burned their West Texas homestead and kidnapped his kid sister. With every shovelful of rich, red earth he threw on the shallow graves, Bowen swore he'd get back his only kin and make the savages pay for their murdering ways. Armed with an old Hawken single-shot and a belly full of bitter hate, the young sodbuster headed west on the vengeance trail.
Tracking the war party by the bloody string of massacres they left behind, Bowen ended up at the old Spanish mission turned Comanche trading post that Texans callled Helltown. Run by the ruthless Comanchero killer Rodrigo Shay, life was cheap as rotgut whiskey there and the closest thing to law was how fast a man was with his gun. But, backed by a trail-tough gang of frontier mustangers with their own score to settle with Shay, Bowen blasts through the gates, hungry for payback. With hot lead pumping from all sides, he's got one chance to save his sister or die in the blood-slick streets of...Texas Helltown.
1990 by Jason Manning Zebra Books (New York) 221 pp ISBN: 0-8217-3218-8
Perhaps the best known of my six Zebra westerns. Inspired in part by the films The Comancheros and The Searchers. I originally wrote the book in first-person. During the writing I had a change of editors at Zebra, and the new one took a look at the completed manuscript and informed me third person would be better, so I rewrote it in a hurry.