Author Description

WEST, Book Three of the Go Love Quartet, closes the circle initiated when Josephine Stepwell made the star-crossed decision to head West with the outlaw husband who'd lied up one side of her heart and down the other. Now, her granddaughter, whose grown up sneaking peaks at her dwarf uncle and all the other Washers hidden in her father's black Bible, runs away from her Utah home to Arizona, where she meets Davey the Dwarf on free beer for Vets Day at Charro's, a south side Tucson bar for washed up professional wrestlers. There, with fellow dropout non-Morman Jack, she is reunited with her long lost kith and kin, standing in for her father, Joey, who'd long ago promised the blood father he'd never met that he'd return. Only he never did. In the mean time, grandfather Buddy'd died, was buried in a cemetery with all the rest of the Washers, and it's there the circle finally closes, with champagne and hard words at the grave side. Steeped in the Stepwell catastrophes of love, West interweaves the strands left hanging in the Quartet's first two novels. It offers healing and, finally, peace to those who have departed in a world of hurt. Tracing the ancient path Geronimo walked to lead the last free Indians on one more run at Old Mexico, Lara manages to break free of the present. She discovers herself and her people, deep-rooted as the Cottonwood where her father's amniotic sack was once buried. She, like the rest of the book's wandering souls, can't help but find part of herself "...in the breath of the mother tree" that is this earth.