The Mavericks
Adam Ballard serves eight years in prison for a crime he did not commit.
On release, he returns to the Texas valley where he grew up, determined
to prove his innocence and reclaim the respect of his family. But with
his father dead and his step-mother re-married, he finds past and
present entwined in a web of violence. Adam is drawn into a situation
even worse than that of eight years previously and played out against
the sinister background of the vast thorned brasada, the greatest
breeding refuge for feral cattle ever known. Here, the high-withered,
curly-haired beasts have gone unbranded by men since the sixteenth
century. With demands for hides and meat growing in the northern
markets, the scene is set for exploitation. In a deluge of bitter
rivalry, guns blaze and men are lynched, and Adam's past is but one part
of an incredible jigsaw of double-dealing, murder...and mavericking,
the illegal branding of other men's cattle.
