The Madstone

With echoes of Lonesome Dove and News of the World, the riveting story of a pregnant young mother, her child, and the frontier tradesman who helps them flee vengeful outlaws, even as an unlikely love blossoms, in a brilliant, beautiful page-turner (Chris Bohjalian, #1New York Timesbestselling author ofThe Double Blind). Texas hill country, 1868. As nineteen-year-old Benjamin Shreve tends to business in his workshop, he witnesses a stagecoach strand a passenger. When the man, a treasure hunter, persuades Benjamin to help track down the vanished coachand a mysterious fortune left aboardBenjamin is drawn into a drama whose scope he could never have imagined, for they discover on reaching the coach that its passengers include Nell, a pregnant young woman, and her four-year-old son, Tot, who are fleeing Nells brutal husband and his murderous brothers. Having told the Freedmens...