Under the Heartless Blue

Arizona, 1884, and Vera Palmer, a 23 year old widow from genteel Connecticut, arrives in the frontier town of Goose Flat with a prospecting claim and a book-keeping job secured from afar. Little does she know, but the boarding house is in fact a brothel where she must keep accounts for the coyly manipulative Madam Sadie Blair. Undaunted, Vera sets out to strike it rich with the help of the charismatic local lawyer, Will Keane, who has fled West to escape demons of his own.

But as their romance blossoms, Vera finds herself increasingly embroiled in the violent, abused lives of Blair's prostitutes. Can love offer her an escape or will the unpredictable, dangerous world surrounding the Star Mansion brothel destroy Vera s hopes of a new life? Here Allyson Stack offers a gripping, beautifully wrought love story amidst a wholly authentic evocation of the Wild West at its most threatening.