The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

About this book:

The alkali dust of Tombstone chokes the air, but the real poison runs deeper—silver fever, badge-heavy politics, and a clan of red-sashed cowboys who treat the border like their private slaughterhouse. Into this furnace step the Earp brothers: Virgil with his deputy's star, James with his shattered arm, and Wyatt, a man who doesn't walk into a room so much as he measures it for exits. They've come for the main chance—faro tables, freight contracts, a slice of the boom—but the town has other plans. The Clantons and McLaurys run cattle stolen from Sonora; Johnny Behan wears the sheriff's badge like a brand; and a consumptive dentist named Doc Holliday coughs his way into legend with a shotgun across his knees.

Tensions coil tight as a mainspring: stagecoach robberies on the Benson road, ambushes in the San Pedro Valley, a courtroom where justice is auctioned to the highest bidder. Then comes the cold October morning when eight men walk down Fremont Street toward a vacant lot behind the O.K. Corral. Thirty seconds. Thirty shots. Three bodies cooling in the dust. But the gunfight isn't the end—it's the spark. What follows is a vendetta ride through the Dragoon Mountains, a courtroom where the law bends until it breaks, and the slow, grim transformation of lawmen into hunted men.

From the New York Times bestselling author of *The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral* comes a visceral, unflinching reconstruction of the West's most famous showdown—stripped of myth, soaked in sweat and gunpowder, and told with the narrative force of a novel and the authority of exhaustive research. This is not the Tombstone of dime novels. This is the town that burned itself down to build a legend.