Improbable Fortunes

In *Improbable Fortunes*, Jeffrey Price takes us on a wild ride into Vanadium, a dusty, down-on-its-heels mining town in southwest Colorado—where it would be fair to assume that nothing has ever happened. But you’d be wrong. As it turns out, quite a lot has happened, starting with a suspicious mudslide that destroys the town’s Main Street and a cowboy, Buster McCaffrey, arrested for the death of one of the richest men in America, Marvin Mallomar.

As the soon-to-retire Sheriff, Shep Dudival, investigates the circumstances surrounding the murder, it comes to light that Buster and Mallomar’s young wife were having a Cowboy Always Rings Twice affair. From there, Price takes this familiar story plot and turns it on its head—folding a rococo cast of Vanadium’s characters into a timeline that begins with Vanadium’s post-WWII labor strife and ends with the Kulturkampf of present day.

While it may all seem humorous and surreal at first blush, one gets the feeling by *Improbable Fortunes’* unguessable conclusion that Price has used the fictitious town of Vanadium—a place without a recognizable gas station, a decent restaurant, or a clean bathroom—as the Rosetta Stone for something larger.