It has been said of five-time Spur Award winner Loren D. Estleman that even "Louis L'Amour looks down with envy" (Kirkus Reviews). Here Estleman applies his incomparable narrative panache to this novelization of a real-life romance that never was. Judge Roy Bean is an infamous arbiter of Old West justice. For years, he writes admiring letters to British stage actress Lillie Langtry, and she occasionally responds. But just as they are about to meet face-to-face, fate intervenes and keeps this oddball romance from blooming.