Across the Cheyenne River (Thorndike Large Print Western) - Hardcover

John D. Nesbitt lives in the plains country of Wyoming, where he teaches English and Spanish at Eastern Wyoming College. His articles, reviews, fiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. He is best known as a fiction writer, with more than thirty books of traditional western, contemporary, mystery, and retro/noir fiction. John has won many awards for his work, including two Wyoming Arts Council literary fellowships (one for fiction, one for non- fiction), a Western Writers of America Spur finalist award for his western novel Raven Springs, and the Spur award itself for his noir short story At the End of the Orchard and for his western novels Trouble at the Redstone and Stranger in Thunder Basin.

Russ Archer, raised as an orphan, longs for the security that a piece of land and marriage could bring. In frontier Wyoming, he meets a lonely young woman, Kate Doolin, who’s working in a store while she looks for her long-lost father. Russ discovers that a big piece of land across the Cheyenne River is about to open up for homesteading, but, meanwhile, he hires on at a brand-new ranch run by a mysterious, worried man named Lidge Mercer. Nesbitt is in no hurry to tell his story, and, as in many of his novels, the true appeal lies both in his minute appreciation of ordinary work and, even more, in the deadpan, laconic, almost mournful exchanges between unschooled men, whose few pleasures revolve around storytelling and the occasional visit to a prostitute. But out of Nesbitt’s seeming inattention a dangerous mystery arises, threatening Russ and Kate and Mercer’s ranch. Russ must prove he’s a good hand not just with horses and fence posts but also with guns. A quiet western that builds to a white-hot, satisfying finish. --John Mort