Hired to impersonate a man who wants to know why he has been summoned to the family home of a person he was accused of killing years earlier, Ned Rippon befriends a family member and struggles to discover whether his targets or his employer are trustworthy.

Here are three of Max Brand's classic short novels, all carefully restored from Brand's own manuscripts, and collected in paperback for the first time. In "Range Jester," Barry Home, once a free spirited cowboy, now an ex-convict, returns to the small town of Loomis. His return is scarcely a welcome one, least of all by the rancher whose testimony was vital in securing Barry's conviction. "Slow Bill" is the story of young Jim Legrange, who feels he...