Publishers Marketplace: Kathleen McFall

The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series: Death is just the beginning.

Enlightenment just took a strange detour. Welcome to LonePine, Wyoming, population 438. It's like any other small, slowly dying town in the American West. Only with more vampires. With meditations on the nature of good and evil, a new cosmology for vampires -- including a shared meta-consciousness where vampire (and human) minds reside between deaths -- and a cast of gritty, quirky, realistic western characters, The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series tangles the vampire and cowboy myths into a groundbreaking new "modern gothic western" genre.

In Book One of the series, The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Darkly Romantic Mystery, perpetually broke, down-on-his-luck cowboy, Tucker, falls hard for Lizzie, a whip smart, big city girl and hotshot reporter. She falls hard for him, too. Things get complicated when Lizzie finds out the awful truth about the undead heritage coursing through her veins. Tucker, with a little help from his Dad, his best friend and paranoid survivalist Lenny, and his overly-sensitive cow dog Rex, take on Lizzie's maniacal vampire father and his beautiful consort Elita. It's a blood-spattered undead apocalypse of terror and tumbleweeds.

In Book Two, Blood and Whiskey, the "vamp-sanity" and mayhem continue as Tucker, Lizzie and the rest of the gang tackle the afterlife, a cold-blooded killer from the old west and a war brewing between the vampire nations. Lizzie is pregnant, with a growing, unquenchable thirst for human blood. The most powerful vampires from the ruling clans are headed to LonePine to test her new powers and if they find her lacking, everyone in the tiny town will be destroyed. But dating the undead isn't Tucker's only problem. Lenny's niece has been snatched from the streets of Portland, Oregon and he turns to Tucker for help. It's an inconvenient time to take a road trip, but sometimes friendship trumps common sense. With a duffle bag of improvised weapons, he sets out for Portland with Lenny to find the kidnapped girl. They end up in remote Plush, Oregon, where -- smack dab in the middle of the sagebrush desert -- they uncover a human blood farm run by a fearsome cowboy enemy resurrected from the Old West. His name is Henry Plummer and his sights are set on Lizzie.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Clark Hays grew up in Montana in the shadow of the Tobacco Root Mountains. In addition to his fiction work, he is a cowboy, a published poet and occasional food critic. Recently, he was nominated for Pushcart Prize for short fiction and not so recently for a Rhysling award for poetry. Clark brings a deep knowledge about the modern west, weaponry, country music and existentialism to his writing. Kathleen McFall grew up in the heart of Washington, D.C. She worked as a petroleum geologist and, later, as a journalist, and has published hundreds of articles about scientific research, energy and natural resources. An interest in the overlap of science and mysticism are an essential aspect of her fiction writing. She received an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship for fiction writing.