by F. M. PARKER
“F. M. PARKER BRINGS THE WEST TO LIFE,” Publishers Weekly declares in assessing the growing acclaim directed at one of America’s premier frontier novelist. Now with this powerful and ambitious work, F. M. Parker demonstrates his mastery anew.
The year is 1859, and in England, beautiful Caroline Shepherd is recruited by a handsome missionary to join other young women in a trek westward to the Mormon state in the mountain west of America. In the Rockies, young fur trapper Sam Wilde is left for dead by savage fur pirates led by DeBreen. Far away in Texas, rancher Nathan Tolliver finds himself alone after his twin brother is murdered by land thieves, whom Nathan tracks down and kills. To find a wife to share his cattle kingdom, Nathan joins four Texans riding northward in a hunt for mates.
On the trackless Great Plains, the threads of life of these characters intertwine. The women going westward toward Salt Lake City, thinly guarded and, like beasts of burden, pulling their scant belongings in carts harnessed to their shoulders, become a magnet for myriad predators. A lusting Pawnee chieftain looks on them as natural prey, DeBreen sees them as easy pickings for profit and pleasure, the Texans see them as a source of wives. Nathan falls in love with the reluctant Caroline and vows to protect the Mormon women at all costs and against all odds. Brigham Young has sent a band of armed men from Salt Lake City to meet the handcart company and to bring every woman to his land of Zion. They arrive with guns at the ready to keep the women from changing their plans as the dangers increase and go off with the Texans.
This gripping novel explodes with frontier passion and adventure. Based on the true events of the Mormon effort to forge a polygamous nation - Brigham Young called “Deseret” - in the heartland of America, it is at once an epic of endurance and a shattering journey into the soul. Historical fiction at its best.