After watching Tombstone (in a spate of Michael Biehn movie binge-watching),
I wanted to read more about Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and Biehn's character,
Johnny Ringo. In one of those serendipitous coincidences, St. Germain's book popped up in my catalog searches.
St. Germain lived in (or just
outside) of Tombstone with his mother and brother with a succession of his
mother's boyfriends. When he is just 20,
his mother is shot to death, likely by her current husband (her fifth).
In this book, St. Germain chronicles his
attempts to make sense of his mother's death as he tries to answer the
unanswered questions of her death.
He
wanders back and forth in time as he recalls his own troubled childhood with
his mother, and along the way, the story of his hometown and the famous
shootouts that took place there. Simply and sparely written, St. Germain weaves together all of these elements beautifully in
a very emotional, suspenseful and touching book. A good pairing with After Visiting Friends by
Michael Hanley.