“I cannot, to this day, stomach the smell of a campfire.”
Those are the first words Heston Price speaks to you in Plainsman Afire, and if you’re the kind of reader who pays attention, you already know this isn’t going to be a gentle story. Heston is a man shaped entirely by fire — by the fire that consumed his childhood cabin in Missouri in the winter of 1867, by the fire of revenge that has been burning inside him ever since, and by the fire that earned him his name out on the Wyoming plains.
Plainsman Afire — my debut novel — is coming soon. And I want to tell you what it’s really about before you crack the first page.
The Day Everything Changed
Heston was still a boy when four riders showed up at his family’s two-room cabin outside Liberty, Missouri. They asked to water their horses. His mother let them in to warm by the fire.
What happened next changed everything. They left Heston’s mother dead on the dirt floor, the cabin in flames, and Heston and his little sister Becky riding into a cold February morning with nothing but the horses they could grab from the barn. Before they disappeared over the hill, one of the riders — a well-dressed man on a black horse — paused, tipped his hat, and rode off. No urgency. No guilt. Just a hat tip, and gone.
That image never left Heston Price. Neither did the names he eventually tracked down: Mitchell Goode. Elliot Mince. Frederic Frye. August Vance. And the fifth one — the man on the hill — whose name he still doesn’t know.
He’s going to find all of them. And when he does, he is going to kill them.
What Kind of Man Is Heston Price?
He’s not a hero. He’s not a villain, exactly. He’s something more honest than either: a man consumed.
Heston Price is one of the finest gunfighters on the Wyoming plains in 1888, and he knows it. His Remington Model 1858 speaks before most men can think, and he wears that skill the way other men wear regret — lightly, and always. He has killed men in saloons, on open roads, in mercantile storerooms. He’ll tell you he doesn’t enjoy it. He’ll also tell you that a man who can’t kill an attacker in five shots has no business carrying iron.
But underneath all that gunsmoke is something remarkably human: a boy who watched his mother die, who raised his sister in a borrowed house, and who has spent over twenty years carrying the faces of five men like stones in his chest.
He is, in the words folks on the trail have started whispering, a plainsman afire — burning with a purpose that’s both worthy and frightening.
Why I Wrote This Story
I’ve spent nearly forty years as a journalist covering human beings at their best, their worst, and every complicated point in between. What I’ve learned is that the most powerful stories aren’t about monsters or saints — they’re about people who contain both.
Heston Price is that character. His quest for revenge is just, his methods are brutal, and his loneliness is real. I wanted to write a Western that felt like that — not nostalgic, not sanitized, but gritty and honest and alive with the kind of detail that puts you on the back of a horse in the Wyoming foothills, smelling the pine needles and black powder in the cold morning air.
The Trail Opens Soon
Plainsman Afire will be available at all major retailers — Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Books, Indigo, Everand, Booktopia, Goodreads, and more. Publication date will be announced shortly — stay connected at chriscoxwriter.com.
If you know someone who loves Westerns, revenge stories, or a protagonist who is impossible to look away from, this is the book. Share this post. Get them ready.
The trail opens soon. Ride with us.