Calvin Taylor had learned the tricks of his trade scouting against the Apaches. Now the Indian Wars were almost over, he was using those same deadly skills to hunt down lawbreakers of all races. Taylor believed there was an organisation behind the stock-thieving sweeping Arizona. In the grim Canyon of the Dead he located the robbers' roost and the outlaw leader. But trapped as he was in a web of treachery, violence and intrigue, pursued by a crazed Apache renegade, his next problem was how to get out of the canyon alive and avoid the shadow of the hangman's noose.

They were two men driven by implacable hatred: Lieutenant Ranald Neal of the U.S. Cavalry, seeking his place in the roll-call of history, as the man who ended the Indian Wars, and Sombra the Apache war chief, bent on revenge. The two deadly enemies fought each other across the savage wilderness of the border country. They met for the last time in The Place of Bones, forbidden ground in the shadow of Ghost Mountain. Caught in the middle, as this genocidal war reached its bloody climax, was the white woman who had been the Apaches captive and whose yellow hair gave Sombra luck in battle. Then, too, there was the formidable Calvin Taylor, Indian scout, hired gun and man killer. Could he, against all the odds, succeed in his deadly mission?

When former hired gun, Calvin Taylor, took the job of sheriff of Oxford County, New Mexico, it was for one reason only – to catch, or kill, the notorious Arizona Kid, and pick up the fifteen hundred dollars reward the governor had secretly offered. Blood money, some called it, and pinning on a sheriff's badge set Taylor against the woman in his life and the community in which he lived. He found himself on the trail of the infamous gang known as the Regulators, hunting down a man who'd once been his friend. And as this trail wound deeper into the wilderness, into the hell-on-earth that was the White Sands, the pursuit became, in every sense, a journey of death.

The Tengen brothers planned to make themselves all the law there was in Coffin Creek and the surrounding Cochise County. Then the whole south east corner of Arizona would be theirs to plunder at will. Behind the tin stars they wore, the brothers were killers, pure and simple... But they'd reckoned without Calvin Taylor, former Indian scout turned Wells Fargo agent. Taylor would bring real law and order to the town, even if he had to do it at the point of a gun. The result was an explosion of violence and killing. Blood ran on the streets of Coffin Creek and a twisted trail of vengeance led high into the mountains of Apache country.

His name was Calvin Taylor but the Apaches called him Shadow Man. Now he was the guide for a wagon train of down-on-their-luck farmers following the Trail of Lost Souls. But the trail became a journey of death and Taylor found himself branded a renegade. Only a man with his peculiar talent for making enemies could find himself in the middle of the bitter war between white man and Apache, being hunted by both sides. He was pursued across a savage land by Loco's Mescaleros and vengeful posses determined to see him hang.