"I'll have your guts for guitar strings, Jeremy Six!" If you've ever seen a she-bear defend her cub against a pack of wolves, you'll know what Ma Marriner was like, only maybe she was bigger and meaner and the wolves were on her side. What the marshal of Spanish Flat had done was to shoot Ma's husband, Buel, while he was going about his business of robbing the town's bank. And neither Ma nor her ornery son Cleve were going to let that go unavenged. Especially when Jeremy Six had added insult to injury by tossing Cleve into the calaboose. So Ma gathered up the clan and all their thirty or more border-rider friends, and the whole pack of them set out for Spanish Flat to skin Jeremy's hide once and for all. The author of more than seventy books, Brian Garfield is one of USA's most prolific writes of thrillers, westerns and other genre fiction. Raised in Arizona, Garfield found success at an early age, publishing his first novel when he was only eighteen - which, at the time, made him one of the youngest writers of Western novels in print. A former ranch-hand, he is a student of Western and Southwestern history, an expert on guns, and a sports car enthusiast. After time in the Army, a few years touring with a jazz band, and a Master's Degree from the University of Arizona, he settled into writing full time. Garfield is a past president of the Mystery Writers of America and the Western Writers of America, and the only author to have held both offices. Nineteen of his novels have been made into films, including Death Wish (1972), The Last Hard Men (1976) and Hopscotch (1975), for which he wrote the screenplay. To date, his novels have sold over twenty million copies worldwide. Brian Garfield died on December 29 2018. He and his wife lived in California.