Stryker
A Hunter Tale
Jim Christina
CreateSpace, 2010

{>}Click here for a podcast recorded on February 19, 2011 of a live interview with author Jim Christina and documentary film maker, Joyce Fitzpatrick. "Around the Barn" airs every Saturday morning from 9:00-10:00 am on KHTS 1220 AM.

Signed by the Author

From our Purveyor of Books:
Author Jim Christina takes us on a ride into familiar territory, yet changes things up with new places and characters. If you've been following the Hunter Tales, this new Western adventure has Hunter passing on his trade to a perfect, willing student from Waco, Texas...Jeff Stryker. As is Christina's style, the language is salty, the action hot and fast, the characters memorable, and the scenic West it's perfect setting. This is the fourth book from Jim Christina's pen, and we hope, more will follow!

Inset photo is of Jeff Stryker and Waco, circa Arizona Territory, November 1882

From the Author's Foreword:
While writing the Hunter novel, The Rights of Men, an itch started in me to change up a little. Slowly a realization hit me that the perfect character for his own story was that of young Jeff Styker of the Circle-J ranch and a staunch supporter of both the Hunter and Jolly Goodman.

From Waco, Texas came two young hands Jeff Stryker and Bobby Malloy. In a horrible twist of fate the jovial and always upbeat Bobby is killed when marauders attach the South Pond on the Circle-J.

The Hunter, for the first time, is feeling his mortality and wants to pass o his trade, teach his craft...and Stryker is a perfect student. Willing to learn, a quick study and eventually, at an early age, he too becomes a hunter of men. 

The locations are the same southeastern Arizona Territory as the Hunter novels and some of the characters are the same but the story is decidedly different. Stryker learns that whereas he has learned his trade there is always something else he can learn. As his friend, Bobby Malloy, once told him, "If'n you cain't learn somethin everyday then you're brain's doin something wrong." And so Jeff Stryker continues his education in the mountains and deserts of the Arizona Territory.

In this story he is forced to take up the hunt on his own after the Hunter is seriously injured by a fall in the mountains. The hunt for el Fantasma (the Ghost) leads him into Mexico hunting the worst killer in Arizona history. He is thrust into a scenerio he never dreamed he would have to be a part of, yet the hunt is too magnetic for him to break it off.

But Stryker has a secret, one that he has never shared with anyone but his
friend Bobby Malloy. It is this secret that makes Jeff Stryker unique and deadly.

I hope you enjoy the story of Jeff Stryker as much as you enjoyed the Hunter stories and as much as I did while writing it because it's not so much the story of a young man as it is the story of a young man learning his potential and coming of age in hard times and in a hard way.

About the Author:
{>}Jim Christina has been an Old West Living Historian for a number of years. He has written several stories, a two act play, 'An Evening with Tom Horn', the Hunter novels and is currently working on his fifth novel, Eastern Men.

Paperback. 276 pages. Shipping weight is approximately 1 lb.