Five Star First Edition Westerns - Chasing Destiny: A Western Story

A Spur Award-winning Author

Bobby Eckstrum is known around the town of Columbia as a drunk. In a surprising turn of events, he is thought to have murdered and robbed Roger Simms, a local rancher. A posse is organized and they hunt down and kill the man they believe to be Bobby. Destiny Eckstrum, Bobby's daughter, does not believe they killed her her father, but rather his equally shiftless brother who lives elsewhere in Colorado. When no one believes her, she decides to set out on her own to try to locate her father. She is accompanied by Michael Jenning, who wishes very much to leave his family farm. In Chasing Destiny, Stephen Overholser has created a story of tremendous emotional depth, filled with mystery, danger, and gripping suspense.

Stephen Overholser was born in Bend, Oregon, the son of Western author, Wayne D. Overholser. He grew up in Boulder, Colorado where he lives with his family.

Michael Jennings is 12 when he throws in with Destiny Jane Ekstrum in her quest to find her father, Harmon, if he is still alive. Destiny was raised in a Denver orphanage, and Michael is an orphan of sorts himself. Destiny's father probably was killed by frontiersman Noah Locke, after Harmon was accused of stealing the payroll from a wealthy rancher. But Destiny thinks the decomposed corpse passed off as her father may have been her uncle. The young pair embarks on an incredible journey of sorts and is soon joined by a protective dog named Boy and--unbeknownst to them--shadowed by a self-serving Noah Locke. Spur Award winner Overholser, the current master of the character-driven western, delivers another winner. The story approaches Shane's sense of melancholy, and young Jennings' narration resonates with that childhood-as-recounted-by-a-wiser-adult voice found in Joe Lansdale's The Bottoms (2000) or even To Kill a Mockingbird. A memorable novel that will be seen alternately as a triumph of human spirit or an example of the unfathomable cruelty of fate. Wes Lukowsky
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved