"An aspiring Ohio transplant's dream of owning his own spread in turn-of-the-century Wyoming is put on hold due to a series of inconvenient murders. Earl Miner, who owns the Pick, makes no bones about insisting that every man who works for him file a claim to 160 acres under the Homestead Act and then sell it to him so he won't be troubled by competing ranchers in the Decker Basin. As soon as cowpuncher Reese Hartley bridles at that arrangement, foreman Dick Prentiss gives him his walking papers, and Hartley packs his gear. Lacking any particular plan or destination, Hartley wanders off, encountering what seems to be virtually every woman in town: Pick hand Ben Stillwell's sweetheart, Bess Ackerman, niece of grain broker Mike Ackerman; Muriel Dulse, a grass widow who also dreams of owning a place despite the tight rein Doyle Treece and the Hudson family, the cousins with whom she lives, keep on her; and Nancy Wisner, a young and flirtatious cousin of the Hudsons. As Nesbitt (Dusk Along the Niobrara, 2019, etc.) shows, however, his most fraught encounters are with aggressive local men who challenge his plan to secure his own land, get physical with him, and invite him to get out of town. While Hartley, who's a good deal less confrontational than either his adversaries or most Western heroes, is still pondering what to do next, Ben Stillwell vanishes and then turns up choked to death, followed by Nancy Wisner. When Treece accuses Blue, a mysterious newcomer to the community, of killing Nancy, blacksmith/marshal Jock Mosby arrests and jails him, but Hartley doesn't think that's the end of the story, and of course he's right. The slight mystery offers a handy peg for Nesbitt's latest valentine to the Wyoming frontier he clearly loves"--
by John D. Nesbitt.
