An American Outlaw is the first book in John Stonehouse’s popular series featuring US Marshal John Whicher. There are now eight books in the series, including one novella, with the latest novel Wolves of the Evening, having just been published in March 2026. This is my first exposure to the series so I don’t know how typical An American Outlaw is to the other seven books, but I’ve been told that Stonehouse writes them as standalone stories that can be read in any order the reader prefers.
In this first one, Gulf War veteran Gilman James (a distant relative of the famous outlaw Jesse James) comes home to find that two of his childhood buddies never recovered from the mental and emotional wounds they suffered in the same war. They are broken men, and James wants to help them. But that takes money, lots of it, because no one else seems much willing to give these men the kind of help they have every right to expect from a grateful nation.
James is a man with few prospects of his own, but he will do whatever it takes to get his hands on however much money it takes to help his friends put their lives back together. The icing on the cake is that he plans to steal all of that money from the very people who have directly made their lives so much worse than they should be. James and his two buddies start a series of armed robberies in Lafayette, Louisiana that all falls apart in a little West Texas bank, and now US Marshal John Whicher, along with numerous other law enforcement officers, is determined to stop the men before they can cross the Mexican border.
Whicher is a veteran investigator who tries to stay one jump ahead of whomever he’s chasing by getting inside their heads deeply enough to anticipate their next move. That skill works well for him but sometimes, as in this case, Whicher can become too empathetic for his own good. And that’s dangerous.
An American Outlaw is a shoot-em-up manhunt story in which the action seldom slows down. Along the way, though, Stonehouse effectively visits the themes of war’s toll on those who do the actual fighting, loyalty, and the gray areas between guilt and innocence. John Stonehouse gives his readers a lot to think about between the gunshots.
