AN UNTHINKABLE CRIME. AN UNFORGETTABLE LOVE.
AND THE GAMBLE OF A LIFETIME.
Red Miller knows how to gamble. He understands a good hand, has the wit to play a bad one, and never makes an uncalculated bet. But when a woman he once loved enlists his help to run her new ranch, he throws everything in and sets out from Wyoming to California to join her. After arriving, he realizes she is still haunted by ghosted memories, in which he played an unwitting part. Consumed by his affection for her, Red seeks to uncover what she has kept hidden. In the process, he learns a painful truth about the past and its irrevocable impact on their lives. When her ranch is threatened by outside forces, the race to unbury secrets accelerates, as does the race for their very survival.
Betrayal, loyalty, and unrequited love ignite the backdrop of two Southern California ranches in this contemporary Western drama. Straddling a bridge between the 20th and 21st centuries, the gamble tells a tale of devastation and redemption, and what happens when courage becomes more important than winning.
author
melinda k. massey
Melinda holds an M.A. in Humanities, with an emphasis in Creative Writing, from Mount St. Mary’s University (Los Angeles, CA) and an M.A. in English Literature from Claremont Graduate University (Claremont, CA). She lives on a ranch in Southern California.
This is her first novel.
But we are the sum of the moments of our lives—all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape or conceal it. If the writer has used the clay of life to make his book, he has only used what all men must, what none can keep from using. Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose.
– Thomas Wolfe
Preface to Look Homeward, Angel
