Amelia Rankin
From the acclaimed author of The Hell Bent Kid: The story of a brave woman fighting to protect her land in the midst of a deadly range war
Amelia Rankin owns nearly two hundred thousand acres of Texas rangeland. When her husband died, she inherited the vast holdings—and with them, a world of trouble.
When Amelia decides to fence off a portion of her land and allow farmers to tend it, she raises the ire of a powerful cattleman who would rather shed blood than see west Texas taken over by homesteaders. The men who work for Amelia vow to stand by her, but when tensions run this high, one spark of violence could set the whole prairie ablaze. Before she knows it, Amelia and her allies are fighting a battle whose outcome will determine the future of the Southwest.
From master storyteller Charles O. Locke, Amelia Rankin is an unforgettable tale of passion, violence, and pride.
Charles O. Locke
Charles O. Locke (1896–1977) was an American author best known for his novels of the West. The scion of a newspaper family, he was born in Tiffin, Ohio, and graduated from Yale University. Locke began his career as a reporter at the Toledo Blade and before long moved to New York City, where he wrote for a number of newspapers, including the New York Post and the New York World-Telegram. Like many, he fell in love not only with the city but with its huge public library and access to the world of theater. He composed songs and libretti for stage shows, wrote plays for radio programs, and joined a local theater group, for which he wrote, directed, and performed, sometimes in his own plays.
Locke published his first novel, A Shadow of Our Own, in 1951, following it with his breakout success, The Hell Bent Kid, in 1957. The story of a young man in the 1880s who is unjustly pursued across the state of Texas by relentless enemies, this mesmerizing tale was heralded by the Western Writers of America as one of the top twenty-five Western novels of all time. 20th Century Fox adapted the book into a feature film, From Hell to Texas, in 1958.
The Southwest continued to fascinate Locke, and it provided the backdrop to two more, equally powerful novels, also set in the nineteenth century: Amelia Rankin (1959) and The Taste of Infamy: The Adventure of John Killane (1960).
