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Arizona Territory, 1899. Ruby Fortune faces an untenable choice: murder her abusive husband or continue to live with bruises that never heal. One bullet is all it takes. Once known as “Girl Wonder” on the Wild West circuit, Ruby is now a single mother of four boys in her hometown of Jericho, an end-of-the-world mining town north of Tucson. Here, Ruby opens a roadside inn to make ends meet. Drifters, grifters, con men, and prostitutes plow through the hotel’s doors, and their escapades pepper the local newspaper like buckshot. An affair with an African American miner puts Ruby’s life and livelihood at risk, but she can’t let him go. Not until a trio of disparate characters—her dead husband’s sister, a vindictive shopkeeper, and the local mine owner she once swindled—threaten to ruin her does Ruby face the consequences of her choices; but as usual, she does what she needs to in order to provide for herself and her sons.
Ashley E. Sweeney is the 2017 winner of the Nancy Pearl Book Award for her debut novel, Eliza Waite, set on a remote island in Washington State and in Skagway, Alaska, during the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898. Sweeney's second novel, Answer Creek, “a gripping tale of adventure and survival based on the true story of the ill-fated Donner Party on their 2,200-mile trek on the Oregon–California Trail from 1846 to ’47,” won the 2021 Gold IPPY Award for best regional fiction as well as first place in the Fiction category in the 2020 Arizona Authors Association Literary Contest, 2021 winner of the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award and winner of the 2021 Next Generation Indies Award.
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