Redeye

In Red Eye, Clyde Edgerton leads us back in time to turn-of-the-century Colorado, where a motley crew of innocents and scoundrels, visionaries and vultures tells us How the West Was Made Safe for Free Enterprise.

The scene is pueblo country and the man with the plan is Billy Blankenship, frontier entrepreneur. Blankenship aims to turn the newly discovered Native American cliff dwellings of Mesa Largo into America's first Roadside Attraction. He enlists the aid of North Carolina embalmer P.J. Copeland in the (ahem) undertaking. The unrepentantly polygamist bishop has other plans for the dwelling - that is, if the bounty hunter doesn't get him first.

The basis of this astounding new novel is historical truth - that, in 1857, a troop of Mormons using Indian wiles attacked a wagon train of pioneers near Salt Lake City. Orders from Brigham Young were to leave none alive to tell the tale. Edgerton has a keen sense of the dark undercurrents of the West. He knows that there were, on both sides of right and wrong, several "left to tell the tale."