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Random House
May 2011
On Sale: May 3, 2011
416 pages
ISBN: 1400068045
EAN: 9781400068043
Hardcover
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Fiction Family Life
The year is 1878, peak of the Texas cattle trade. The place
is Dodge City, Kansas, a saloon-filled cow town jammed with
liquored-up adolescent cowboys and young Irish hookers.
Violence is random and routine, but when the burned body of
a mixed-blood boy named Johnnie Sanders is discovered, his
death shocks a part-time policeman named Wyatt Earp. And it
is a matter of strangely personal importance to Doc
Holliday, the frail twenty-six-year-old dentist who has just
opened an office at No. 24, Dodge House.
Beautifully educated, born to the life of a Southern
gentleman, Dr. John Henry Holliday is given an awful choice
at the age of twenty-two: die within months in Atlanta or
leave everyone and everything he loves in the hope that the
dry air and sunshine of the West will restore him to health.
Young, scared, lonely, and sick, he arrives on the rawest
edge of the Texas frontier just as an economic crash wrecks
the dreams of a nation. Soon, with few alternatives open to
him, Doc Holliday is gambling professionally; he is also
living with Mária Katarina Harony, a high-strung Hungarian
whore with dazzling turquoise eyes, who can quote Latin
classics right back at him. Kate makes it her business to
find Doc the high-stakes poker games that will support them
both in high style. It is Kate who insists that the couple
travel to Dodge City, because “that’s where the money is.” And that is where the unlikely friendship of Doc Holliday
and Wyatt Earp really begins—before Wyatt Earp is the
prototype of the square-jawed, fearless lawman; before Doc
Holliday is the quintessential frontier gambler; before the
gunfight at the O.K. Corral links their names forever in
American frontier mythology—when neither man wanted fame or
deserved notoriety. Authentic, moving, and witty, Mary Doria Russell’s fifth
novel redefines these two towering figures of the American
West and brings to life an extraordinary cast of historical
characters, including Holliday’s unforgettable companion,
Kate. First and last, however, Doc is John Henry Holliday’s
story, written with compassion, humor, and respect by one of
our greatest contemporary storytellers.
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