The Horse Dentist of Mesilla
A Western Novel

About this book:

In the dust-choked streets of 1883 Mesilla, Arthur Phelan doesn't carry a badge or a Bible—he carries a brass speculum, a twelve-inch float, and the quiet certainty that a horse in pain is a horse that kills. When a freighter's gelding quids his hay and a cattle baron's eighteen-hundred-dollar stud bites his own flanks raw, they send for the tooth-carpenter. But fixing mouths in a territory where the railroad passed you by means reading the truth in splintered bone and fetid gum, and every extraction leaves Arthur deeper in debts that aren't measured in silver.

Wade Clanton rides into the plaza with a gray gelding whose jaw was shattered by a blacksmith's hammer and a temperament that won't brook refusal. Don Manuel Armijo holds the land grants, the judges, and the beef contracts—and now he holds Arthur's marker. Between the two of them, they'll decide whether a man who heals horses for a living gets to keep breathing, or whether the rustlers on the Jornada, the Apache moon, and the stolen bay waiting in the arroyo will collect what's owed first.

*The Horse Dentist of Mesilla* is a Western built on grit instead of glamour: a protagonist whose trade is blood and bone, a border town rotting slow in the Santa Fe's shadow, and a plot that tightens like a twitch on a fractious stallion's lip. For readers who want their frontier fiction with the smell of alkali dust, the screech of steel on enamel, and a hero who survives because he knows exactly where the nerve ends.