Wade Coleman was raised on a cattle outfit in the Arizona high desert outside Prescott, and on a shelf of Louis L’Amour paperbacks that belonged to his grandfather, a real county deputy who kept the peace in a hard corner of the state for thirty-one years and told stories that were better than the books. Wade has been trying to write up to both of them ever since.

He spent his working life close to the country he writes — years as a wrangler and packer, then two decades running a livestock and brand operation across the Arizona Strip — which is why his horses behave like horses, his distances are real distances, and his lawmen solve most of their problems with patience and a hard word before it ever comes to iron. He started writing the Sutter County novels in longhand at branding camp, testing the lines on men who would tell him, bluntly, when he got the country wrong.

His Sutter County Lawman series follows a haunted former Army scout who takes a dead marshal’s star for the worst reason a man ever does a hard thing — because no one else will — and spends the series making a lawless county fit to live in. The action is clean and fast, the frontier detail is lived-in, and the code is the old one: you stand where you’re needed, and you don’t leave.

Wade lives in Chino Valley, Arizona, with his wife, Carol, a couple of good horses, a bad-tempered mule named Deacon, and his grandfather’s badge in a frame by the door. He still starts most mornings a-horseback, and still thinks the truest thing a man owns is whether he’ll stand.