Ruby Sisson Library

David Ballantine's debut novel Chalk's Woman, is a story about freedom, liberation, and love. Set in the violent backdrop of the waning months of the Civil War, Chalk's Woman addresses violence and redemption as seen through the eyes of a girl maturing into a woman. Ann, a fourteen-year-old girl, wakes up after a terrible explosion in a make-shift hospital during the waning months of the Civil War-her house no longer stands and her mother is dead,...

"Traveling the Santa Fe Trail on a botanical exploration, Linnea Newberry longs to be taken seriously by the other members of the expedition. When she is rescued from an accident by Flynn McQuaid, her grandfather hires him to act as Linnea's bodyguard, and Flynn soon finds himself in the greatest danger of all-falling for a woman he's determined not to love"--

Young Daniel Boone Trewick, caught with a young woman, flees Missouri believing he has killed the girl's father in a fight. He joins a freighting outfit on the Santa Fe Trail, and in Taos he meets Thomas L. "Pegleg" Smith and is invited to join an expedition to California to steal horses and mules. Meanwhile in California, Juan Medina, a young vaquero in trouble for consorting with the ranch owner's daughter, is framed and jailed. After the ladrones...