The story of the Earp Brothers and Doc Holliday and the events leading up to the street fight in Tombstone have inspired enough fiction and nonfiction to fill small libraries. That gives Mary Doria Russell’s Epitaph: A Novel of the O.K. Corral quite a bit of competition for the un-official title of the best, but she earns it.
Russell, whose 2011 novel Doc is hands-down the best fiction written about the dentist-turned-gunfighter (Victoria Wilcox’s trilogy not excepted), has written an epic of 580 pages that leaves you wanting more. The depth and lyric of Epitaph lifts the characters and events of the Tombstone troubles out of the realm of genre fiction and into literature.
—Allen Barra, author of Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends
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