1886. Geronimo and his followers, the last Apache
resistance to white encroachment, have been transported
east, and the blue wool defenders of The Fort settle
into boredom, directing their cruel attentions to
illicit liquor and prostitutes, their clearest enemy a
weak officer s bullheaded wife on a moral crusade. One
broken and battered Chiricahua boy, Na-e-te-nay, drags
himself across the Arizona desert, held together only by
a bleak vision of revenge; a vision that will cause him
to abandon his warrior traditions and set his feet on
Coyote's Trail--the road of murder and evil. After a
brothel shootout between Na-e-te-nay and the US cavalry
ends in fire and death, America, a broken young Mexican
woman with her own reasons for hating the cavalry, finds
herself pulled into his plot. Enlisting the nominal aid
of Rogerio, a shiftless, sadistic whiskey peddler who
knows more about America s hellish past than even she
does, the three conspire to draw Na-e-te-nay s remaining
enemies out of the safety of The Fort, using America's
body as bait. But America has her own vision of
revenge... "With COYOTE'S TRAIL, Ed Erdelac has created
a story as raw as the wound from a bullwhip. His
blistering prose, combined with superb use of time,
place, and character, gives COYOTE'S TRAIL the kind of
life that springs off the page and into the reader's
consciousness. That's a rare thing these days, and in
the world of genre fiction, rarer still. This is a damn
hard story about damn hard men, and told damn well."
--C. Courtney Joyner, Author of SHOTGUN
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