As a young man, Richard Wheeler had a clear goal. He wanted to be a newsman, and maybe even a pundit, contributing his ideas to the commonwealth. But his life turned into a series of disasters, and by midlife he was out of work and unemployable. He had no idea how to make a living. As a last resort he turned to fiction, and somehow found himself in a new world, filled with friends and colleagues who taught him how to create a story and sell it. This was the world of genre fiction, the world of paperback racks in supermarkets, where westerns, romances, mysteries, and science fiction are sold....

In the early 2000s, Richard S. Wheeler, author of more than 70 titles, proposed a nontraditional and risky series to an editor. While the traditional western depicts courage at arms or in combat, these books would depict moral or ethical courage. Wheeler felt it was time to expand the genre, open it up to other stories about the settling of the West with novels in which the heroes simply do the right thing. The editor went for it, and the three books of HEROES were published by Signet/NAL as mass-market paperbacks. Restitution deals with a former bank robber who has gone...