At Fort Dragoon, survival depends on more than courage?it depends on who's giving the orders.
Lieutenant Ben Hannibal is the finest soldier on the frontier: battle-tested, fearless, and fiercely loyal to his men. But the moment he arrives at Fort Dragoon, he finds himself targeted by a ruthless commanding officer with a reputation for destroying young officers for sport.
Colonel Mallory rules the post with intimidation and cruelty, assigning Hannibal every filthy, impossible duty while driving the regiment into a deadly campaign against the legendary Apache chief Togomasai?dead or alive.
As tensions rise and the desert war turns savage, Hannibal realizes the greatest threat may not come from the Apache warriors hunting in the mountains, but from the cold-blooded colonel determined to break him.
Now, trapped between an unforgiving frontier and a commander who wants him ruined, Hannibal faces a brutal choice: obey orders ... or fight the man wearing the same uniform.
Autorentext
The author of more than seventy books, Brian Garfield is one of USA's most prolific writes of thrillers, westerns and other genre fiction. Raised in Arizona, Garfield found success at an early age, publishing his first novel when he was only eighteen. Which, at the time, made him one of the youngest writers of Western novels in print.
A former ranch-hand, he is a student of Western and South-western history, an expert on guns, and a sports car enthusiast. After time in the Army, a few years touring with a jazz band, and a Master's Degree from the University of Arizona, he settled into writing full time.
Garfield is a past president of the Mystery Writers of America and the Western Writers of America, and the only author to have held both offices. Nineteen of his novels have been made into films, including Death Wish (1972), The Last Hard Men (1976) and Hopscotch (1975), for which he wrote the screenplay.
To date, his novels have sold over twenty million copies worldwide. He and his wife live in California.