A Spur Award–winning Author 2013 Spur Award Finalist for Best Western Novel A Booklist Top 10 Western for 2012 "I'll tell you something else about those cowboy pictures. They're clean, barely a smudge of dirt anywhere, but what happened out there in City of Rocks wasn't clean. It was grimy and smelly and gut-numbingly cold. Men died . . . They got knocked down hard and the life spilled out of them like blood from a butchered hog. I guess I ought to know since I was there. Since it was me who did most of the killing that day." — Joseph Roper, Federal Writers Project 1938
