It’s 1867 and the Civil War is over. Young Matt Slade, the son of Texas settlers, fought for the South in some of the bloodiest battles—and he survived. Because he’s good at surviving. When two shady bounty hunters seize him for a crime he didn’t commit, he determines he’ll survive so they won’t take him dead, as in “dead or alive.”
While being transported with a group of calvary escorting some women to Fort Grissom, he encounters Sarah Hammond, the young daughter of passionate Massachusetts’s abolitionists, who is on her way to join her fiancé, a Yankee major, a man she does not love. Abhorring the abuse of Matt by the bounty hunters, Sarah intervenes to assure Matt is properly fed and no longer beaten. Shortly after, Comanches attack. Matt and Sarah survive only because of Matt’s resourcefulness. To get to the fort, they must depend on each other—and they grow close.
Finally at the fort, Sarah's fiancé learns that she has fallen in love with “Rebel trash," and he takes his revenge on the young lovers. And a fierce revenge it is. It will be 1875 before the story is over…
O’Connell has a way of putting you right in the action, of making you feel the emotion and of understanding what led the hero and heroine to be who they are. The tender budding love between Matt and Sarah is the genuine thing. But they will have many hurdles to cross before they can be together. Along the way, O’Connell will make you laugh and she’ll make you cry.
This is a story of sacrificial love and standing up to bias that says a fallen woman and a gunslinger aren’t worthy citizens (“What did you do with a man who loved you too much to love you?”). I absolutely love her writing! Simply put, O’Connell tells GREAT stories and she does it very well.
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