***SPUR AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST WESTERN NOVEL***
PAPERBACK EDITION NOW AVAILABLE
A man either chases his dreams, or he dies.
Present-day ranch hand Charlie Lyles longs for an era before mechanization, when a cowboy's greatest ally was his horse. He remembers stove-up old men telling of cattle drives and stampedes and shallow graves in lonesome country with few fences. At a dollar a day, none of them died rich, but for a cowboy who knew no other way to live, maybe it was a fair trade.
Society has pushed Charlie toward a conformity that he hates, but he is about to change the rules. Walking up to a ranch hand at a remote line shack in West Texas, he steals a horse, leaving a perfectly good pickup behind. "You tell 'em, amigo," he says. "Tell all those hombres with their fancy equipment to just stay out of my world or play hell tryin' to catch me."
Track him they will, with a helicopter and radios and assault weapons, but they are headed into territory that hasn't changed in a century . . . and they are trailing a man born a hundred years too late.
A new print edition of When Cowboys Die will be released by TCU Press in September 2022. It will contain a preface as well as an afterword that details the actual 1976 manhunt that inspired the novel.