Idaho, 1879. When the McCandles gang shoots up a small town, seventeen-year-old Joseph Roper decides to bring them to justice, alone. Decades later in 1938, he tells his story to an interviewer with the Federal Writers Project. “A lot of people go to those moving-picture shows and think they’re seeing the real McCoy, but that’s not the way it was. You take a guy like William S. Hart, or that kid, John Wayne. They try to come off rough-barked, but they’re nothing but a bunch of lilies compared to men like Ian McCandles. “I’ll tell you something else about those cowboy pictures. They’re clean, barely a smudge of dirt anywhere, but what happened out there in City of Rocks wasn’t clean. It was grimy and smelly and gut-numbingly cold. Men died, and when they did they didn’t just grab their chests and fall over. They got knocked down hard and the life spilled out of them like blood from a butchered hog. I guess I ought to know since I was there. Since it was me who did most of the killing that day.”

A powerful and lyrical debut: a botched robbery sets two men on conflicting journeys across the untamed landscape of the American West. After an attempted horse theft goes tragically wrong, sixteen-year-old Caleb Bentley is on the run with his mean-spirited older brother across the American Southwest at the turn of the twentieth century. Caleb’s moral compass and inner courage will be tested as they travel the harsh terrain and encounter those who have carved out a life there, for good or ill. Wealthy and bookish Randall Dawson, out of place in this rugged and violent country, is begrudgingly chasing after the Bentley brothers. With little sense of how to survive, much less how to take his revenge, Randall meets Charlotte, a woman experienced in the deadly ways of life in the West. Together they navigate the murky values of vigilante justice. Powerful and atmospheric, lyrical and fast-paced, All Things Left Wild is a coming-of-age for one man, a midlife odyssey for the other, and an illustration of the violence and corruption prevalent in our fast-expanding country. It artfully sketches the magnificence of the American West as mirrored in the human soul.