O'Brien 8: Shoot to Kill

by Ben Bridges

BULLET-PACED FRONTIER ACTION FROM 21-TIME NUMBER ONE BESTSELLING AMAZON KINDLE WESTERN WRITER BEN BRIDGES!! The Texas Rangers sent Carter O’Brien south of the border with orders to kill a madman. It was said that his target—a murderous bandit named Salazar—had the face of an angel and the heart of a demon. Certainly, judging by all he’d heard, O’Brien sure figured he needed killing. Given the choice, though, he’d sooner have faced Salazar in a head-on gunfight than turn back-shooter and kill him from hiding. But the only trouble with that idea lay with Salazar’s eight-strong gang of cut-throats, for it was common knowledge that if you took on one of them, you took on the lot—and even a professional fighting man like O’Brien had to draw the line somewhere ...  

132 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 1, 2010

About the author

For as long as I can remember, I always wanted to be a writer, but it was my Dad, Henry Whitehead, who really fostered my interest in the west. As a security man employed by a large chemical company, he often found himself working the nightshift by himself, and to pass the long, lonely hours he would hand-copy pictures from old Buffalo Bill Annuals and then fetch them home for me to colour in.

During the day, Dad also made up western stories and dictated them into our old reel-to-reel tape recorder, so that I could listen to them when I got home from school. He even added sound effects as he went along, wiggling his fingers in a bowl of water to give the impression of outlaws fording a shallow stream, or bursting balloons to simulate gunfire. So it's really no wonder that I eventually developed such an interest in the west.

As I grew older, I started reading just about every western I could lay my hands on. I began with J T Edson's Floating Outfit novels and eventually moved on to the Larry and Stretch westerns of Marshall Grover (a.k.a. Leonard F Meares). Along the way, I also started writing westerns of my own, the adventures of Clint Jones, Railroad Detective, being among the earliest.