Under the Heartless Blue

Arizona, 1884. Vera Palmer, a 23-year-old widow from genteel Connecticut arrives in the frontier town of Goose Flat, to take up a prospecting claim inherited from her dead husband and a part-time job as a boarding house bookkeeper. The boarding house is in fact a brothel but, needing the money, Vera takes the job anyway. She's soon drawn into the violent, abused lives of the working girls and Sadie, their Madame. Vera is attracted to bar regular Will Keane, a local lawyer, who helps her investigate the mining claim. Can love offer her an escape or will the unpredictable, dangerous world surrounding the Star Mansion brothel destroy the relationship and Vera's hopes of a new life? A gripping, beautifully wrought love story amidst a wholly authentic evocation of the Wild West at its most threatening.

Allyson Stack was educated at Yale, Arizona State and University of Edinburgh. Her work has appeared in magazines and journals in the U.S. and UK and she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012.