Carlton Stowers

During his lengthy writing career, Carlton Stowers has had his highs and lows, all the while learning more and more about his chosen craft. In STORYTELLER, he chronicles the pitfalls and prat falls, suggests how best to pitch a book or article to editors, the do's and don'ts of research and interviewing. While spinning a humorous story or two along the way, the author touches on the entire spectrum of writing for a living, producing what iconic university journalism professor David McHam calls "the best book on writing I've ever read."

In this compelling new installment of bestselling author Ralph Compton's Sundown Riders series, a man seeks revenge for the death of his wife and sons while caring for his traumatized daughter.Carl Novak returned to the Texas hill country after fighting in the Civil War, but unlike most of his neighbors, Carl didn't fight for the Confederacy. He was a Union soldier. Carl tries to resume his life as a farmer with his wife and three children. One day, when returning from an overnight trip to buy a calf, he finds his home burned to the ground and, even worse, his wife and sons murdered. His young daughter escaped the slaughter by hiding in the fields. She is so traumatized that she refuses to speak. Carl has one clue: a group of strangers has just left town. One man had a tattoo of a scorpion on his hand and one man was missing two fingers. Carl is determined to track them and exact his revenge.

In this breathless new installment in bestselling author Ralph Compton's the Gunfighter series, an ex-con fights to free his hometown from the clutches of a greedy land baron. When twenty-five-year-old Lewis Taylor is released from the Texas State Prison, he receives little attention as he walks into the midday sunlight, free after serving five years for a crime he didn't commit. His only interest is in getting back to his hometown of Gila Bend, Texas, a quiet farming community about which he has only warm, idyllic memories. During his long years in prison, he survived by thinking fondly of the home he'd known since boyhood--and of one special girl, Darla Winslow. What he finds instead is a town dramatically changed. Once a happy and carefree place to live, it is now populated by people who are angry and afraid. One man, Captain Archer Ringewald, has taken control of the town, and now he's turning the townspeople, even Darla, against Taylor. Can one ex-con single-handedly save an entire town?

Were it not so carefully documented, the remarkable football career of former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach would seem more fiction than truth. From his All-Star days as an Ohio schoolboy to All-American and Heisman Trophy-winning heights at the U.S. Naval Academy and from a four-year military stint to a decade spent leading America's Team to Super Bowl successes, the Pro Football Hall of Fame standout served as the gold standard for Sunday afternoon greatness.

A ruthless rancher crosses the wrong man in the "USA Today "bestselling series... Haunted by memories of the Civil War, Coy Jennings just wants to find work as a ranch hand and to begin saving for a small farm where he could finally enjoy peace and quiet. Arriving in the Texas settlement of Phantom Hill, Coy soon befriends a damaged but likable stable hand by the name of Ira Dalton and hopes for a future with a lovely widowed mother and her eight-year-old daughter. In order to make the Hill a decent place to settle down, Coy must wage a new kind of war and take a stand against ruthless ranch owner Lester Sinclair, his sadistic sons, and the murderous band of cattle rustlers who work for them. And after the Sinclairs turn on innocent Ira, Coy is driven to seek justice for his trusted friend...cost what it may."

Engrossed by the short lives of innocent victims, Stowers uses The Girl in the Grave . . . and Other True Crime Stories to tell the tales of devastated parents dealing with evil forces and unanswered questions that invaded their once normal lives, and the effect on the law enforcement officers duty-bound to involve themselves in such evil and troubling situations, investigating and seeking resolve and justice.

Heisman Trophy winners, All-Americans, All-Pros, MVPs and record-setters have, throughout the glamorous history of football in Texas, been all but commonplace. For decades, one set of superstars routinely replaced another, constantly adding to the proud legacy of the state's favorite sport. In ""Texas Football Legends"" you'll meet the cream of a rich and talented crop, reliving those days when they climbed to stardom from high school stadiums in out-of-the-way places to the Saturday afternoon cheers as collegians, and finally in the celebrated ranks of professional football.As you read of their individual deeds, you'll hear the cherished echoes of championship games won and lost, high goals achieved and adversities overcome. Borrowing from a long-used cliche in Texas, football has been elevated to a form of religion. That said, this collection of biographies of the greatest of the great serves as the game's Sunday Best.

In the middle of the Great Depression, nine brothers from a small town in the Texas Hill Country played a baseball game they would never forget - the All-Brothers Baseball Championship in Wichita, Kansas. The Deike Brothers from Hye, Texas, would take on the Stanczak Brothers from the Chicago suburb of Waukegan, Illinois, in a game staged as a promotion by a coffee company. Veteran Texas author Carlton Stowers relates the little-known true story of Texas' greatest all-brothers baseball team, a story that includes former President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who sometimes filled in before the ninth Deike brother was big enough to play. LBJ claimed to have mailed his first letter at the post office in Hye and later swore in a Postmaster General there. But only the brothers were allowed on the field when the Deikes squared off against the Stanczaks. No ringers were allowed, and the brothers had to bring their birth certificates to confirm their identities. The game itself would be secondary to the thrill of traveling outside Texas for the first time - a week-long trip each way in two Model A Fords; of watching the great Satchel Paige pitch in a semi-pro tournament; and of having real uniforms for the first time. ""I think we all grew about a foot taller,"" recalled Victor Deike, ""the first time we put them on."" ""The story of the amazing Deike Brothers baseball team,"" writes Bob St. John, ""recalls those pleasant, youthful memories of weekend afternoon games played on makeshift fields.

Down Farm Road 308, an hour's drive south of Dallas, amidst sprawling fields of cotton lies a small community- Penelope, Texas (population 211). Here, where the only thriving businesses are the granary and the post office, unless you count the soft-drink machine in front of the fire station, two-time Edgar award-winning writer Carlton Stowers discovered a special town that came together, not only to support their six-man highschool football team- the Penelope Wolverines- through thick and a lot of thin, but also, and more importantly, each other. Where Dreams Die Hard is a warm and revealing portrait of the American heartland- and of one small town's love affair with the team that unites it. "Through his unforgettable depiction of innocence, goodness, loyalty, and friendship...Carlton Stowers gives us a moving portrait of a community that, in the words of one of the Penelope faithful, is like'stepping into a Norman Rockwell painting.'" (Billie Letts, author of Where the Heart Is ) "High school football in Texas is both sport and religion, and Stowers brilliantly brings this to light in Where Dreams Die Hard." (Jim Dent, author of The Junction Boys )

An unsolved murder spree that left a town frozen in fear...In rural Texas, just before Christmas in 1984, a young nurse was found raped and murdered in her Wichita Falls home. Within weeks, a second woman was found-her brutalized body dumped in the frozen Texas plains. Over the next seventeen months three more women would fall victim to a faceless evil, fueling the city's fears and baffling authorities whose every lead came to a dead end. For one haunted man the case would never die. A fight for justice as cunning and relentless as the killer himself...Almost fourteen years to the day of the first murder, ambitious investigator John Little reopened the cold-case files determined to deliver closure to the victims' friends and families, and bring a killer to justice. Working on his instincts, following every imaginable clue, Little embarked on an ingeniously clever and exhaustive cat-and-mouse game to trap an elusive serial killer whose sick fantasies would finally be silenced forever.

Fifty years ago Abilene High School, under legendary Coach Chuck Moser, became a football dynasty in Texas. Moser moved to Abilene in 1953 at age thirty-four. What followed were seven of the most amazing years in the rich history of Texas high school football. The 1954, 1955, and 1956 teams won state championships. From 1954 to 1957 the Eagles won an incredible forty-nine consecutive games. Abilene captured six district titles in a row in a rugged West Texas league known as the Little Southwest Conference. In Moser's seven years, Abilene won seventy-eight games and lost only seven. In its 1999 wrap-up of the twentieth century in Texas, The Dallas Morning News designated the Eagles of 1954-57 as the ""Team of the Century"" in high school football. Veteran sports writer Al Pickett explores how Moser worked his magic to galvanize an entire community in support of his program and turn an otherwise ordinary group of high school kids into the best football team in Texas history.

Death in a Texas Desert is a fast-paced collection of 17 compelling true crime stories from the pages of the award-winning The Dallas Observer. From the "Phantom Killer" that haunted Texarkana in teh mid-1940s to the day of terror in 1991 when a crazed man began spraying bullets into Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, author Carlton Stowers recoutns the infamy and infamous from the crime files of Texas.

On a fall afternoon in 1983, in an upscale Dallas suburb, Rozanne Gailiunas was found stripped, bound to her bed, and shot through the skull. Her four-year-old son has been napping peacefully in the next room when she was killed. Rozanne's husband, Dr. Peter Gailiunas--and her lover, Larry Aylor--immediately fell under suspicion. Until a surprise informant identified the mastermind behind the murder as Aylor's own wife, Joy--a woman so driven by jealousy and greed that she put out a contract on both Rozanne and later her own husband. On the run and managing to elude investigators for eight years, the two-year search for the socialite would eventually end in the south of France. There, authorities found the elusive femme fatale, living as comfortably among the world's elite as she was among hired killers. At last, the authorities' questions would be answered, to reveal a shocking insight into the heart of an unlikely killer, and a small-town Texas crime that made international headlines.

When the bodies of three teenagers were found on the shores of Lake Waco, Texas in July, 1982, even seasoned lawmen were taken aback by the savage mutilation and degradation they had been subjected to. Yet only 52 days after the gruesome triple-murder was discovered, frustrated authorities suspended the case indefinitely. Patrol Sergeant Truman Simons, who had been called to the scene that night, saw the carnage first-hand -- and vowed to find the ferocious killer or killers. He soon became a man with a mission, risking his career and his family's safety in search of evidence. Plunging himself into a netherworld of violence and evil, Simons finally got close enough to a murderous ringleader to hear his careless whispers--and ultimately, put him and his three accomplices behind bars for the brutal slayings. Now, in his Edgar Award-winning account of the Lake Waco killings, acclaimed true crime writer Carlton Stowers lays bare the facts behind the tragic crimes, the twisted predators, and the heroic man who broke the investigation--with important updated information based on new developments in the case.