The Lone Star Fair

I wrote The Lone Star Fair because I stumbled onto a piece of Texas history that was simply too good to leave buried.

In 1852, Corpus Christi was still more ambition than city. Henry Kinney was trying to build something on the edge of Texas, and the Lone Star Fair became a remarkable gathering of settlers, Rangers, vaqueros, Native people, speculators, dreamers and men who would go on to shape South Texas.

The more I researched it, the more I realized the history was already stranger than fiction.

So instead of writing a traditional history book, I created fictional characters who could move through that real world and let the reader walk beside them. My goal was to give you a front-row seat to what it might actually have felt like to be there, not simply tell you what happened afterward.

I wrote it in the tradition of the Golden Age Westerns I grew up loving: fast-moving, character-driven, historically rooted, and built to be read in a weekend rather than carried around for a month.

And because the real story behind the novel is so remarkable, I included a short historical section at the end explaining what was documented, what was fictionalized, and which characters and events came directly from the record.

That part has turned into one of my favorite surprises. History-minded readers have been catching little details and “Easter eggs” throughout the story that are not necessary to enjoy the novel, but add another layer for anyone who knows the history. During a recent radio interview, the host kept pointing out details I had tucked into the story that he recognized from the historical record.

One early reader summed up the feel better than I ever could:

“It’s like Louis L’Amour took a trip to South Texas and wrote about it.”

That was exactly the kind of Western I hoped to write.

If you enjoy real history, classic Western storytelling, and discovering a forgotten corner of Texas through the people who might have lived it, I think you’ll enjoy The Lone Star Fair.

Included with Kindle Unlimited.