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About the Author

Graham Masterton is the author of the Amazon bestselling crime series featuring Katie Maguire which takes place in Cork, Ireland. Originally editor of Mayfair and the British edition of Penthouse, Graham Masterton’s is also a British horror writer, and his first novel The Manitou was released in 1976. This novel was adapted in 1978 for the film The Manitou.

Further works garnered critical acclaim, including a Special Edgar award by the Mystery Writers of America for Charnel House and a Silver Medal by the West Coast Review of Books for Mirror. He is also the only non-French winner of the prestigious Prix Julia Verlanger for his novel Family Portrait, an imaginative reworking of the Oscar Wilde novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Masterton was also the editor of Scare Care, a horror anthology published for the benefit of abused children in Europe and the USA.

If you’d like to read more by Graham Masterton, visit his website or join his mailing list, here.

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Also By Graham Masterton

Railroad (1981)

Solitaire (1982)

Railroad

Graham Masterton

Dedication

Dla mej najserdeczniejszej przyjaciólki …

mej najbardziej milowanej ukochanej …

tej, z zawsze źywić

me nadzieje, me me marzenia,

i której zawsze oddany cialem i …

Prologue

Collis Edmonds had appeared only twice on the observation platform of his private car between Ogden, Utah, where he had joined the train, and Winnemucca, Nevada; and then only to smoke the last quarter of a burned-down cigar and toss it on to the tracks. Emily had been intrigued, and had asked the black conductor who he was. He looked so lonely, standing by the wrought-iron rail — a tall, thin-faced man with a slight stoop and eyes that seemed to be permanently fixed on some point in the middle distance. He was dressed in black, although on the second occasion that Emily had seen him, he had worn a red fez with a tassel, too — the kind that gentlemen used for smoking and writing.

‘That,’ the conductor had told her emphatically, ‘is The Boss.’

Emily went back to her Pullman sleeping car and sat down on the green plush seat, taking out her notepad and her pencil. Outside the window, through the tapestry curtains, the scrubby sagebrush plain moved past at the astonishing speed of twenty miles per hour.

She wrote, ‘I have seen the man the conductors call “The Boss”. He travels in his own Pullman car, although for one so wealthy, travelling in only one private car must be “roughing it”, as they say out here in the West.’