DAKOTA

The mid-1880s were strange years in a strange land for blue-blooded New Yorker Theodore Roosevelt.

Fleeing a dazzling political career and the shattering deaths of his mother and young wife, he is determined to be one of the new “Beef Barons.” Though he builds not one but two successful ranches, roams Dakota’s fantastic Bad Lands while hunting elk and grizzly bears and helping bring Law to the Territory, Roosevelt is on a collision course with another bull-headed, blue-blooded, imperious rancher and entrepreneur, the Marquis de Mores. Mutual dislike between the two escalates into midnight rides, shots in the dark and finally a face-off with scatterguns. Matt Braun has done a bully job with one of the most neglected stories of the West.

—William Garwood