"This is a gorgeous, intelligent, and heart wrenching story...a tale of trust and family love and a belief in goodness and truth-in the face of immense wickedness-unspooled for your reading pleasure by a naturally gifted (and clearly well-read) storyteller."
This tale - the first in a series of three - opens in the summer of 1874, in a prison camp south of Carson City. Falsely accused and incarcerated, two half-brothers find themselves in a losing battle to survive corrupt and brutal conditions. Cole Franklin, twenty-nine, is the privileged scion of the late, much-lionized patriarch of a wealthy California family. Jesse, twenty-four, is that patriarch's bastard son, a fact unknown to Jesse or the surviving Franklins until a scant year and a half before.
Jesse had come to the Franklins as an itinerant cowboy. He is the younger of the two men, but he had ridden a long, hard trail of poverty, prejudice, and violence in his few years. Jesse had grown up a dirt-poor, hard-working, fatherless boy in a dying Sierra mining town; by age sixteen, he had seen three years of combat as a scout and sharpshooter for the Union Army, and spent the last eight months of the war interred in a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp.
Cole is a strong man, and brave, but their current predicament is unlike any battlefield he has ever faced. Jesse understands too well where they are, and what might lie ahead. He takes desperate action to ensure Cole's freedom. The consequences of that action, for Jesse and the Franklin family, are severe and far-reaching.
Trail Markers begins with the brothers' struggle against raw criminality - first, for simple survival; ultimately, for justice. Jesse faces bigotry, mob violence, and the shattering of his own mental health as he battles to regain his freedom and find an honorable path home to family and to the woman he loves.
In the course of this story and the books that follow, Jesse's complex, often harrowing past is revealed: not an unrelenting tragedy, but a tapestry of light and dark. The darkest point of his life brought him together with the woman he loves. Through brutal experiences and blessed relationships, love and loss, each thread is necessarily born of another and intertwined with events in the present. Past and present are told in parallel. Unique bonds and profound changes evolve for Jesse and the members of his adopted family, as they confront both danger and difficult truths. This novel is an exploration of those bonds, whether by blood or by choice; the varied shades of forgiveness, change and reconciliation; and the unexpected sources from which courage and compassion may come to us, in the face of suffering and social injustice.
"The author herself refers to these as cowboy stories, and they are - with all of the action and appeal that genre evokes. But below that surface description is a profoundly moving exploration of what it means to be human. To err, to forgive, to belong...I've read the full series multiple times, finding something new in each read. Some days I'll just linger on a paragraph to savor the language and the glimpse into our shared humanity. This is a writer with a gift."
"We need a book that shows us who we can be, and the truths that deserve to be defended. Jesse is our north star. More human than Captain America, more breakable in body and spirit, Jesse is equally unflinching in his faith in right and wrong, and possesses a deep understanding of what we lose when essential truths are twisted in service of the worst elements of human nature. Both the very best and the very worst of our human condition are on display here. You will recognize them."
