STARS AND SIX-SHOOTERS: The Careful Man: Book 3

The acclaimed comedic Western trilogy reaches its conclusion.Some men keep the peace with a six-shooter. Marshal Theodore Pembroke keeps it with a telescope, a chalkboard, and a truth he has never dared say aloud.Two years after an accident of paperwork turned a Yale astronomer into a Wyoming lawman, Moon Creek is thriving - twenty-six buildings, seventy-six weeks without gunfire, and a marshal who solves his problems with orbital mechanics instead of bullets. Then Ambrose Latchford steps off the Tuesday coach.He carries no gun. He carries a railroad.Latchford buys valleys the way other men draw pistols - quietly, legally, one frightened family at a time, behind names that vanish before a subpoena can find them. And he has discovered the one lever that can break Marshal Pembroke: the single irregularity in an otherwise honest life, a thing kept in a locked drawer that should have gone cold long ago and stubbornly, impossibly, has not.To keep the town, Teddy will have to spend his one secret in public - and discover whether a place can love a man once it knows exactly what he is.A story about courage disguised as bookkeeping, about the difference between a truth kept and a truth spent, and about the bravest thing a careful man ever does: stop being careful, out loud, in front of everyone.Perfect for readers of Charles Portis's True Grit, Patrick deWitt's The Sisters Brothers, and anyone who likes their Westerns clean, clever, and genuinely funny.Begin the series with The Curious Case of Marshal Theodore Pembroke - or ride straight through to the finale. The trilogy is complete, and it sticks the landing.