Howard Petrie

A ruthless college student resorts to murder in an attempt to marry an heiress. Student Bud Corliss is wooing Dorother Kingship purely for her father's mining fortune. When he finds she is pregnant he realises she is likely to be disinherited, so cleverly stages her suicide. After a couple of months her sister back home finds evidence to question the suicide verdict, but by then has a new boyfriend of her own... —Jeremy Perkins {J-26} State-run Stoddard University students Bud Corliss and Dorothy Kingship are secretly dating, they not having told anyone for fear of working class Bud not being accepted by Dorothy's hyper-critical father, wealthy businessman Leo Kingship, owner of Kingship Mines. Mr. Kingship's hard and critical nature led to he divorcing his wife solely for a "mistake" on her part years earlier, and has led to a strained relationship with both Dorothy and her sister, Ellen. Bud even calling her Dorie instead of Dorothy is one thing she loves about him in distinguishing him from anything in her past life. Bud aspires to get out of his working class situation. Their relationship hits a major bump when Dorie informs him that she is pregnant with his child. While Dorie wants to get married, she seeing it as an inevitability in they loving each other, Bud, stating the problem of her father, sees, unstated, almost anything else as preferable to marriage, especially at this stage of his life in it jeopardizing getting out of that working class life. Without any viable option that Dorie would agree to, Bud ends up with the idea of murdering her. While he seems committed to killing her, what happens is affected by Mr. Kingship in his relationship both with Dorothy and Ellen, Ellen in falling under the spell of a man herself, and Gordon Grant, Dorie's math tutor who has another part-time job which makes him naturally questioning and suspicious. —Huggo Bud Corliss is an ambitious college student with big plans for himself and an heiress, Dorothy Kingship. But then Dorothy goes and gets herself pregnant. It's his child, too, of course; but this ruins everything. Her moralistic father will disown her and will certainly never accept him. It seems he's trapped. Bud's mother knows something is troubling her son, but he won't talk to her about it. All she knows is that Bud doesn't want to turn out like his father, with holes in his shoes. He doesn't have to worry. As his mother says, when he turns his mind to something, he does it. Unknown to her, his thoughts have turned to murder. —J. Spurlin

In 1883, an American merchant ship's captain is searching for a treasure in diamonds from a sunken Dutch ship in the vicinity of a volcanic island in the Dutch East Indies. The Dutch East Indies, at the end of the nineteenth century. An adventurous captain of an American merchant vessel is looking for a sunken Dutch vessel containing 10,000 precious diamonds. Unfortunately, he's not the only one and then there's also that volcano on the nearby island of Krakatau, waiting to explode in its historical, disastrous eruption... —Homme A. Piest <piest@pobox.leidenuniv.nl>

When a town boss confiscates homesteaders' supplies after gold is discovered nearby, a tough cowboy risks his life to try and get it to them. Two men with questionable pasts, Glyn McLyntock and his friend Cole, lead a wagon-train load of homesteaders from Missouri to the Oregon territory. They establish a settlement outside of Portland and as winter nears, it is necessary for McLyntock and Cole to rescue and deliver food and supplies being held in Portland by corrupt officials. On the trip back to the settlement, up river and over a mountain, Cole engineers a mutiny to divert the supplies to a gold mining camp for a handsome profit. —Herman Seifer <alagain@aol.com> Glyn McLyntock has taken a job leading settlers west. He is helped by Emerson Cole, a man with a shady past whom McLyntock saves from a lynching. The homesteaders set up home a few days from Portland, but when McLyntock goes to collect their winter supplies he finds a town gone gold crazy. Can he get the food back to the settlers, and can he still count on Cole? —Jeremy Perkins {J-26}

In California during the Civil War, a Confederate patrol and a Union troop must set their differences aside in order to survive a Shoshone attack. A Confederate troop, led by Captain Lafe Barstow, is prowling the far ranges of California and Nevada in a last desperate attempt to build up an army in the West for the faltering Confederacy. Because the patrol saves a stagecoach, with Johanna Carter as one of the passengers, from an Indian attack, and is marooned on a rocky mountain, it fails in its mission but the honor of the Old South is upheld. —Les Adams <longhorn1939@suddenlink.net>