Ambrose G. ("Almighty God") Bierce, San Francisco's legendary newspaperman and sometime-sleuth, is hardly surprised to be consulted by William Randolph Hearst when the latter's mistress finds herself photographically compromised. But in the rough 1890s Bay Area streets, Hearst's isn't the only case on the boil. Bierce and his sidekick Tom Redmond follow a trail of murder that leads from a sinister British yachtsman to a photographer of female flesh,...

"Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880's is, in ways, our national Camelot: a never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the confrontation at the OK Corral takes on some of the dry purity of the Arthurian joust. Oakley Hall, in his very fine novel Warlock has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity. Wyatt Earp is transmogrified into a gunfighter named...

A sheriff is brought in to clean up the crime-ridden town of Warlock.