Wyatt Earp, An American Odyssey

Born to the Badge was a 2019 Spur Award Finalist! Shunted from his entrepreneurial ambitions to profit from the boomtowns of the frontier, twenty-six year old Wyatt Earp returns to law enforcement. In Wichita, Kansas the town leaders become disenchanted with his hardline methods, and so he moves to a place where an iron-rule is needed-Dodge City. With him comes Mattie Blaylock, a runaway prostitute, who, like Wyatt, is searching for a chance at a better life. As assistant marshal in Dodge, Wyatt establishes a reputation as an uncompromising peace officer, but he knows that police work will never deliver what he really wants: wealth and the respect of the upper class. After joining the Black Hills gold rush and then serving a stint as railroad detective in Texas, he returns to Kansas, only to pin on the badge again and inadvertently forge his path into history.

The third book in Mark Warren's historical fiction trilogy ends with a bang. In Tombstone, Arizona Territory, despite a silver strike promising entrepreneurial opportunities, Wyatt Earp returns to law enforcement, posing a new threat to the cow-boy rustlers running rampant on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. The Earp brothers make as many enemies as they do allies in a deeply divided community. Aspiring to be county sheriff, Wyatt bargains with outlaw informants in his pursuit of three wanted men. When the deal unravels, the cow-boy traitors fear retribution from their own, planting the seed for the thirty seconds that will ensure Wyatt Earp his place in history-the gunfight that erupts behind the O.K. Corral. What follows-assassination and swift justice-guarantees that Wyatt Earp's name will forever serve as one standard within the debate of law versus order.