Scoundrel in the Thick: Volume 1: The Life and Times of Colonel Thomas Edward Scoundrel, USA, Ret.

Summary

Colorado, 1882. When his best friend’s fiancée is kidnapped, an unlikely hero must battle robber barons, bandit gangs, the US Cavalry, and Cheyenne warriors to bring her home. Along the way he will also have to foil a plot to steal a country. 

Civil war hero and adventurer Thomas Scoundrel didn’t expect the search for his friend’s fiancée in frontier Colorado to be easy. He also didn’t expect to be beaten and tossed into a desert ravine by a powerful cattle baron, tortured and held captive in an Indian village, or pursued for weeks by dozens of hired guns.

He teams up with Marshal Bat Masterson, reunites with his old friend Buffalo Bill Cody and falls under the spell of Dawn Pillow, a beautiful native healer. A German paleontologist comes to his aid, along with a wild Scottish preacher, a Cossack army officer, an opera-loving Cheyenne chief and the legendary bandit leader, Demetria Carnál.

Much of the action takes place outside Denver during an international fishing tournament where young Adolf Coors serves up beer, author Mark Twain makes an impassioned speech, and Mary Orvis teaches anglers how to tie a fly.

Mix in a ‘flying’ T-Rex, poetic silver miners, fly-fishing native warriors, Oscar Wilde, a plot to steal northern Mexico and, of course, plenty of dynamite, and Scoundrel in the Thick takes the historical novel to new heights of adventure and humor.