The Bradys and “Badman Bill”

A legendary detective. A wilderness that swallows men whole. One madman who was supposed to be dead.

Old King Brady has tracked killers through back alleys and opium dens, but the mountains above Hangtown are something else entirely. When Wells Fargo calls him north to chase a half-million in stolen gold—and the lunatic who took it—Brady walks into a case that refuses to behave.

Badman Bill should be a skeleton at the bottom of a gorge. Instead, he's a living ghost haunting the wilderness near Mount Baker, sitting on a fortune in gold nuggets and shooting at anyone who gets close. The locals call him the Hermit of Hangtown, and they say it with fear.

Brady and his young partner Harry arrive expecting a manhunt. What they get is worse. A bridge collapses. A young woman vanishes, snatched into the forest by a wild figure who may or may not be their quarry. And a second, far more dangerous enemy moves in the shadows—a man with reasons of his own for finding Badman Bill first.

As the wilderness closes in around them, Brady pushes deeper into country where every trail ends in rock and every warning promises death. The gold is out there. So is the girl. So is a killer who has survived once already.

Can the greatest detective in the West flush a madman from the mountains before the wrong side finds him first?