Dead Man’s Hand: Book Three of the Saga of Doc Holliday

His name conjures images of the Wild West, of gunfights and gambling halls and a legendary friendship with the lawman Wyatt Earp. But before Doc Holliday was a Western legend he was a Southern son, born in the last days before the American Civil War and raised to be a Southern gentleman. Now the story of his life in the Old South and the Wild West as told in The Saga of Doc Holliday comes to a dramatic conclusion in Dead Man’s Hand.

Tombstone, Arizona Territory, is the richest silver boom town in the country, promising fortunes to anyone daring enough to stand up to the stage coach robbers and rustlers who infest the nearby mountains. But John Henry Holliday is only trying to make a little money off the gambling tables when he’s caught up in a secretive plot to stop the disturbances before they start a threatened war with Mexico. When suspicions rise and tempers ignite, the plot turns into a war between cowboys and lawmen, and he becomes a player in the most famous street fight in the Wild West.

The aftermath brings retribution and a reckoning that sends John Henry and his friend Wyatt Earp fleeing for their lives. But a hoped for sanctuary in Colorado is broken by legal battles and bounty hunters and the unwelcome celebrity of national newspaper coverage of the OK Corral shooting. And for John Henry, the attention brings hired guns hoping for a moment of fame against the infamous Doc Holliday.

He can never return to the quiet life he once knew, but as the mountain altitude and illness take their toll, he is forced to turn to the one person he thought he’d never see again. It’s a reunion that’s been too long in coming, and brings revelations that challenge everything John Henry thinks he knows about his friends, his family, and himself. And with luck, he’ll have one last chance to prove himself as the Southern gentleman he was raised to be. Dead Man’s Hand is a tale of sin and recompense and the redeeming power of love, of the making of legends and the making of a hero.