Books

I've bundled together the six Colt Ostergaard stories published in the Space Cowboy anthologies and written seven more, plus interconnecting scenes between each one, making it a novel.  More Colt.  More Shelby.  More bullets and frontier justice on the far, far planet of Fenris!

It's available now in digital and paper from Amazon.

"Walking the Beans" edged ahead of some really fine stories by great authors to be included in "Auntie Heroes" by Raconteur Press, available in April, 2026.

Something weird is going on at Aunt Leone's farm.  Weird like in aliens and crop circles and dead bodies.  Every night Aunt Leone puts out a cherry pie on the back porch and in the morning, it's gone.  Who's eating the pie?  Why does Aunt Leone wear combat boots to bed and sleep with a handgun?  What does she know that she's not telling?  

My short story “The Uncanny Valise” is included in the "Uncanny Valet," anthology, published by Raconteur Press in December of 2025.

“Hasty” Hastings is an interstellar vacuum cleaner salesman, and if he doesn’t make a sale soon, he’ll be stranded on a backwater planet so far off the spiral arm it doesn’t even rate a footnote in the Encyclopedia Galactica. Lucky for him, he runs into a Technologically Sapient Entity in the form of a talking briefcase. The question is whether this was good luck or bad.

Glitched Grimm was edited by Steve Diamond and my short story "The Hunger" is a twisted take on Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.  The dwarves take Snow White in to cook and clean for them.  What could go wrong?  Add this to your bookshelf and find out!

"There's something about the Cowboy that speaks to us all."-- Ian "Lawdog" McMurtrie.

This anthology has a lot of new and great writers, of which company I'm honored to be a part of.

"No Home on the Range" is the first Colt Ostergaard story, where he finds out that his war record makes him unwelcome in his home town.

This is the first time my name appeared on the cover of a book!  I was stoked when I first saw it!

My story in this anthology is "Bad Blood on the High Plains" where Colt helps Shelby Yodersen (who isn't your typical farmer's daughter) out of a tight spot and so runs afoul of a roving gang of cutthroats.  Bullets fly and before the dust and blood mist settles, he learns that not everyone on your "side" is guaranteed to be a good guy.

My short story in this anthology is "The Cards on the Table," the third Colt Ostergaard story.  This starts out with Colt losing a hand of poker to a corpse (which he still can't figure out how that happened) and goes on to help a family foil some claim jumpers.

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"Death and Dying in Feral Canyon" is the fourth of Colt's stories  and appears in this anthology with a nine other great writers.  Here he runs into Shelby Yodersen again, "all growed up" and asking for his help locating a kidnapped woman.  As usual, trouble comes looking for him and he won't back down.

This one holds a special place in my heart.  Not only is "Guns Against the Dying Light" included in this anthology, I was invited to pen the introduction.  In the fifth outing for Colt Ostergaard, a doctor gives him a few months to live, if that much.  However, the local Gene Bank has been robbed and if he can get back the what was stolen, they'll recommend a radical new therapy that might save his life.


 

This is the final (for now) Space Cowboy anthology, and I have the honor of being included in all six volumes.

In "The 8:15 to Bad Axe" Colt is dealing with the side effects of the radical therapy he received in "Guns Against the Dying Light" when the train he and Shelby are riding gets hijacked.  Sure loot is what the raiders are after, but there's also a deadly ulterior motive for the heist.

I read a lot of "Best Of..." science fiction anthologies when I was growing up.  And I am honored and flattered to be included in this one.  If you've read "Guns Against the Dying Light," that's the one that my writing peers and Science Fiction legend Ben Yalow selected to be included in this volume.

This is a good one to get a taste of the kind of stories the Raconteur Press is publishing, and perhaps encourage you to track down stories by these other authors.