INCOMING

• "Max Brand" (Frederick Faust), The Gentle Desperado.  Western fix-up novel from three stories first piublished in Western Story Magazine in 1927 under the name "George Owen Baxter."
• Swanee Ballman, Tamarind.  Christian thriller.  A stranger file a motion to remove the cross from the water tower in a small Florida town.  Bad things happen.  I normally don't give this type of book a second glance but I was intrigued by the cover painting by Andy Davenport. Will the coer be the only decent thing about the book?  Time will tell.
• Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan and the Foreign Legion.  A late in the series addition, and oneof the very few I have not read.  (I had a copy many moonsago but it went walkabout.)  An American bomber crashes in Sumatra and one of the passengers -- guess who? -- rips off his clothes, dons a loinclothe and goes out to face the jungle.  Joined by allies from different nations, Tarzan takes on the Japanese occupiers.
• Jackson Cole" (house name), Border Hell.  A Ranger Jim Hatfield western.  Hatfield was createdin 1936 by A. Leslie Scott writing as "Jackson Cole" for Ned Pines' Texas Rangers pulp  magazine.  Scott moved onto paperback novels in the early Fifties, both writing and re-writing Hatfield stories.  Since new Hatfield stories were also appearing in Pines' publications, Scott then changed the character's name and continued to write the paperbacks. Other authors of the Hatfield stories hiding under the "Jackson Cole" pen name were Tom Curry, Peter Germano, Charles Heckleman, and probably others I am unaware of.  Border Hell was published as a 1952 paperback; I don't know if it had appeared in a magazine before.  This time Hatfield faces a killer gang in Corpus Christie.
• "E. J. Copperman" (Jeff Cohen), An Uninvited Ghost.  The second book in the Haunted  Guesthouse mystery series.  Alison Kirby helps the resident gumshoe ghost at her guesthouse on the occasional case.  This time Alison has to deal with a reality TV crew while trying to catch a killer.
• Nelson De Mille*. Ryker #2:  The Hammer of God.  Best-selling author DeMille began his novelist's career with three books about NYPD cop Joe Ryker**, a hero who will do anything -- legal or not -- to get his man.  (The remaining four books in the series were credited to "Edson T. Hamill" -- almost certainly a pseudonym -- who may or may not have been DeMille.  The series was later rewritten -- by whom? you might well ask -- and published as by "Jack Cannon.")  Anyway, in this book Ryker goes after a homicidal monk.
• Judy-Lynn del Rey, editor. Stellar #7.  SF anthology with nine stories.  The final volume of a distinquished anthology series.
• Martin H. Greenberg & Jim C. Hines, editors, Heroes in Training.  Fantasy anthology with 13 stories about would-be heroes.
• John Masefield, The Midnight Folk.  Classic children's fantasy by the one-time Poet Laureate of England.  Young Kay Harker is introduced to the Midnight Folk by his black cat, Nibbins.  He soon learns of a plot by evil witches to steal the lost treasure of the Harker family.
• Bruce McAllister, Dream Baby.  Vietnam era novel with fantasy overtones.
• "Dean McElwain" (house name),  Preacher's Law:  Widow Maker/Trail of Death.  Omnibus volume of the first two western novels in the seven-book series..  "McElwain" is credited with the first five books in the series, while Barry Myers wrote the final two.  [Despite an anonymous internet claim that "McElwain" was a real person [the anonymous writer's grandfather, who died in 1989], the fifth book in the series has been credited to David Robbins; I have no idea who really wrote the first four books.)  Jeremy Preacher, late of Mosby's Raiders, returns home to find his plantation destroyed, his parents murdered, and his sister raped and murdered.  He seeks vengeance.
• Andre Norton, creator, Tales of the Witch World.  Fantasy anthology of 17 stories set in (or based on) Norton's Witch World.  Witch World started out as science fiction, then morphed into fantasy as the series grew.
• E. Hoffman Price, The Devil Wives of Li Fong.  Oriental fantasy novel from one of the great pulp writers.  Poor Li Fong doesn't suspect that his two wives are actually spirit-demons.
• "Luke Sharp" (Frederick Glidden), The Rustlers.  Western novel, "a smashing tale of cruelty and hate, rustlers and outlaws, death and vengeance."  Originally published as Sunset Graze.
• Tom Rob Smith, The Farm.  Psychological thriller.  Is Daniel's mother really mad, or is she telling the truth and his father involved in a criminal conspiracy?
• Dennis Wheatley, The Rape of Venice.  A Roger Brook historical novel.  It's 1796 and Roger, on a mission for Prime Minister William Pitt, becomes involved with "a seance, a duel, a shipwreck, cannibals, slavery, kidnapping, the violation of a harem, and a desperate assault against a walled city."  Phew!
• Connie Willis, Passage.  SF novel of near-death expiences and obsession.
• Richard Wormser, Ride a Northbound Horse.  YA western.  Cav is determined to join the cattle drive and proe that a boy has a place in a cowboy's world.  Wormser (1908-1997) was a prolific author of pulp, detective, western, stories. as well as movie and television tie-in novels.
• T. M. Wright, Boundaries.  Horror novel.  When David's twin Anne is murdered, he tries to contact her spirit to discover her murderer.  The murderer, however, has different -- and deadlier -- ideas.  The author passed away this Halloween from Parkinson's disease.  He was 68.   Another writer taken much too soon.

* For the most part DeMille's name is presented without a space.  On the cover and title page of this book De Mille is spaced.

** Actually DeMille may have begun his career as "Robert Novak," author of the Supercop Joe Blaze series; some of the Ryker books may have begun life as a Joe Blaze novel.  Or not.  It's all ery confusing.