The Last Gunfighter

The Last Gunfighter is a western novel by William W. Johnstone, published in 2000. Its central character, Frank Morgan, is a gunfighter whose reputation has followed him across the West.

He arrives in northern California, where the loggers have a story about something in the woods that kills like an animal, with growling, clawing and ripping. They call it the Terror of the Redwoods.

A local timber baron has put a bounty on the creature, and the woods fill with trigger-happy men and half-drunk hunters who are bound to hurt somebody. Morgan does not believe in creatures of that kind, and he decides to get to the bottom of the story. The bounty brings out every man with a rifle and no sense, and the country fills with people who would rather shoot than look properly. Morgan's reputation makes him one of the few men the loggers will talk to.

The novel is a frontier mystery as much as a western, and it puts a man whose reputation rests on gunfighting into country where the danger is reported as something other than human.