Trouble Returns (Ruby and Maude Adventure)

Trouble Returns is the third installment in the Ruby and Maude Adventure series.

Winner of the 2017 Spur Award from Western Writers of America for Best Juvenile Fiction.

Eleven-year-old Ruby is in an unbelievable amount of trouble. Trouble in school, trouble with the Sisters of Mercy, trouble with her cat named Trouble, and trouble with Pa after he proposes to the school principal. In 1896 Cripple Creek, Colorado, Ruby narrowly escapes death, and her donkey, Maude, steals the story with an unexpected surprise.

“If you haven’t met Ruby, Maude, and Trouble, you’re in for a treat and a surprise ending. Enjoy!”
—Lois Ruby, author of Steal Away Home

Nancy Oswald is a retired teacher and writer. She lives on a working cattle ranch in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of Colorado where she herds cows, chickens, cats, dogs, and one nearly human donkey. Trouble Returns, the third book in the Ruby and Maude Adventure series, is her fifth work of historical fiction for children. It follows Trouble on the Tracks set in Cripple Creek, Colorado, in 1896. Her other historical fiction books are Nothing Here but Stones, based on a Jewish Colony settled in Cotopaxi, Colorado, in the early 1880s, and Hard Face Moon, a dramatic and poignant novel set in 1864 at the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado. Oswald is also the author of Insects in the Infield (middle grade humor) and Edward Wynkoop: Soldier and Indian Agent, a young reader biography that won a 2015 Spur Award. She is the recipient of the Willa Literary Award, is a two-time Spur Award finalist, has twice been an EVVY Award winner, and was a Colorado Book Award finalist for the first Ruby and Maude Adventure, Rescue in Poverty Gulch.