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Prospector Phidias Crowly is dying. Before he dies, he wants to make sure that his niece Grace will be taken care of. He had hoped she’d marry and settle down, but that’s not likely to happen with a rough girl like her, so they head to Silver Bluff, Colorado, looking for a silver mine that may not even exist. Phidias is sure it’s somewhere in Silver Bluff, but Grace thinks they’re probably on a thousand-mile, silver-coated, wild-goose chase.
On the outskirts of town, someone shoots at them—someone who wants that silver mine just as badly as Phidias does, and he doesn’t care who he has to kill to get his hands on all that wealth. Phidias enlists the help of Marshal Jim Morgan to keep his niece safe and find the men on their trail. But Jim soon figures out that Grace isn’t a woman who needs a man’s help—and that Phidias might die before they find the silver mine.
Desperate to find the mine, Phidias consults a gypsy fortune teller who has an agenda of her own. She works out of a bar that the keep swears is haunted—and with the gypsy conjuring up ghosts, it’s not hard to believe.
I’ve found another Western author that I totally love (I’ll let you in on a little secret though: Lance Howard is Howard Hopkins). In The Silver-Mine Spook, Howard mixes a Western storyline with a bit of a ghost story, and he blends in a mystery, too. I especially thought that the gypsy was a nice touch.
Grace may be on the rough side (mostly because her life has made her that way), but there’s no doubt that she loves her uncle, and there’s even a part of her that longs for a stable life with a man she can love. And Phidias is a tough but lovable old cowboy who tugs at your heartstrings as he fights to live long enough to see his niece taken care of.
Mysterious and a bit spooky with surprising emotional depth, The Silver-Mine Spook is one of those novels that you’ll be eager to get back to—that is, if you can even bear to put it down in the first place. Hungry for a Western that colors outside the lines? Then The Silver-Mine Spook is for you.
