Jonathan Laurence has been displaced from his job by a corporate merger and is down to his last few thousand dollars, when a violent, chance encounter places him in the company of Curtis and Don Ed, two unsuccessful criminals. In a desperate measure to maintain his social status, Jonathan and his new associates plan a robbery which goes very badly wrong. In the aftermath Jonathan takes off for St. Martin with Don Ed's topless dancer girlfriend, Tiffany. When a valuable treasure is discovered missing, Jonathan and Tiffany are pursued in the Caribbean by a cast of dangerous and unsavory characters. This is a hilarious adventure with colorful but likable characters who can't seem to get anything right.

Two young gunslingers ride into the heart of evil in this Ralph Compton western. Nathan Stone was a legendary gunfighter who did everything he could to be a father—while still following his own violent trail of honor. Now Wes Stone, barely eighteen, but full of the hard wisdom of the West, is being drawn into the kind of fight that cost his father his life. A secret organization of criminals is replacing freshly minted gold with counterfeit coins, threatening to plunge the growing nation into crisis. Called upon to penetrate this conspiracy that reaches from New Orleans to California, Wes and his fellow warrior, El Lobo, find themselves targeted by hired killers with a deadly plan of their own... More Than Six Million Ralph Compton Books In Print!

A comprehensive book about United States $20 gold coins.

It's the most valuable ounce of gold in the world, the celebrated, the fabled, the infamous 1933 double eagle, illegal to own and coveted all the more, sought with passion by men of wealth and with steely persistence by the United States government for more than a half century—it shouldn't even exist but it does, and its astonishing, true adventures read like "a composite of The Lord of the Rings and The Maltese Falcon" (The New York Times). In 1905, at the height of the exuberant Gilded Age, President Theodore Roosevelt commissioned America's greatest sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens—as he battled in vain for his life—to create what became America's most beautiful coin. In 1933 the hopes of America dimmed in the darkness of the Great Depression, and gold—the nation's lifeblood—hemorrhaged from the financial system. As the economy teetered on the brink of total collapse, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his first act as president, assumed wartime powers while the nation was at peace and in a "swift, staccato action" unprecedented in United States history recalled all gold and banned its private ownership. But the United States Mint continued, quite legally, to strike nearly a half million 1933 double eagles that were never issued and were deemed illegal to own. In 1937, along with countless millions of other gold coins, they were melted down into faceless gold bars and sent to Fort Knox. The government thought they had destroyed them all—but they were wrong. A few escaped, purloined in a crime—an inside job—that wasn't discovered until 1944. Then, the fugitive 1933 double eagles became the focus of a relentless Secret Service investigation spearheaded by the man who had put away Al Capone. All the coins that could be found were seized and destroyed. But one was beyond their reach, in a king's collection in Egypt, where it survived a world war, a revolution, and a coup, only to be lost again. In 1996, more than forty years later, in a dramatic sting operation set up by a Secret Service informant at the Waldorf-Astoria, an English and an American coin dealer were arrested with a 1933 double eagle which, after years of litigation, was sold in July 2002 to an anonymous buyer for more than $7.5 million in a record-shattering auction. But was it the only one? The lost one? Illegal Tender, revealing information available for the first time, tells a riveting tale of American history, liberally spiced with greed, intrigue, deception, and controversy as it follows the once secret odyssey of this fabulous golden object through the decades. With its cast of kings, presidents, government agents, shadowy dealers, and crooks, Illegal Tender will keep readers guessing about this incomparable disk of gold—the coin that shouldn't be and almost wasn't—until the very end.

Entrusted with a cargo of 2,000 Henry rifles--weapons that can turn the tide for the Union--and $15 million in newly-minted gold eagles, Captain Thomas Gunnison must lead a caravan across the Mexican desert after his ship is attacked and deliver the money to Vera Cruz. His caravan could change the course of history--if bloodthirsty Mexican guerillas and Confederate soldiers don't stop him first. Original.

They are the most valuable coins on earth . . . Only a handful still exist, each one worth millions . . . Now they have vanished from an impenetrable fortress . . . and the killings have begun. Somehow, impossibly, someone has invaded Fort Knox and stolen five of the world's last remaining Double Eagles -- the $20 gold coin ordered destroyed by President Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Now, one has resurfaced during an autopsy in France -- in the stomach of a murdered priest. Disgraced FBI agent Jennifer Browne needs to recover the priceless coins to resuscitate her stalled career -- and her investigation is pointing her toward Tom Kirk, a brilliant international art thief who wants to get out of the game. But Kirk's only chance for freedom -- and survival -- is to find the missing coins, joining Browne, an unlikely ally, on a breakneck race across the globe and into the lethal heart of a shocking conspiracy of greed and power . . . and death.