"Murder Stalks the Fur Trails" opens this new quintet of short novels. Lee Brand, an independent trapper, decides that the time has come to break the monopoly of Rocky Mountain Fur and makes a harrowing journey to sell his furs in St. Louis. In "Crow-Bait Caravan" Kaycee Garrett is transporting hydraulic mining equipment deep into Montana Territory. She is a good shot, but the journey means passing through an area devastated by cholera, haunted by hostile Sioux Indians, and controlled by a well-financed freighting company bent on destroying all competition. Young Dobie Burton in "Wild Men of the Fur Frontier" ran away from home and headed to the wilderness to get his start as a fur trapper. He joins up with legendary mountain man Colonel Harvey Gillis only to be confronted by an equally legendary Scotsman who defends his traps, and takes no prisoners. For Painter Cole in "The Buckskin Army Heads South" the objective is to find where Esperanzado panuela hid his fabulous cache of furs before he was tortured to death in an attempt to learn the location. In "King of the Buckskin Breed" a wilderness guide who has become a fugitive after guiding a Yellowstone pack train into an ambush - from which he alone escaped - is now offered amnesty if he will act as guide for a second pack train. -- Jacket flap.