By Darryl James, Published by Amazon Kindle 2024

This historical novel showcases West Texas during the 19th and 20th centuries when the brutal and cold-blooded Comanche dominated the region. These fierce horseback warriors were feared by the settlers, soldiers, and other tribes. European colonists were raided and massacred.

In a massacre of Fort Parker, a nine-year-old girl named Cynthia Ann Parker was captured and raised by the Comanche. She later married Chief Peta Nocona, and their son, Quanah Parker, became the last famous Comanche Chief.

New Jersey William Turley brought his family to West Texas on a cattle drive from Fort Worth. Turley left the cattle drive and bought a small ranch in Midway Station―the Texas Pacific Railroad’s halfway stop between Fort Worth and El Paso. The railroad’s lawyer, Stephen Bainbridge, went to West Texas to buy mineral interests. Bainbridge, a psychopath, hunted human prey under the guise of a full moon, which he felt gave him power. The Turley family became prosperous ranchers and merged their ranch in Midland Countywith their daughter’s father-in-law’s ranch in Upton County, creating a large ranching property overlying a billion-barrel Spraberry Trend oil deposit. Despite the growth of this family empire, child abuse tore into the thread of its household.

The Turley family’s daughter’s son formed Roper Oil Company, a leader in implementing multi-stage fracking and horizontal drilling technologies in the Spraberry Trend and an underlying oil-rich Wolfcamp formation.

The Turley family’s housekeeper has an alcoholic husband who was sexually abusing their prepubescent daughter. The drunken husband murdered his wife, who was trying to protect their sleeping daughter. The following morning, the husband dumps his wife’s body, takes his unsuspecting daughter to school, and then kills himself. The Turley family intervenes, and William Turley and his wife adopt the poor orphan girl. She grows up a cowgirl on the Roper Ranch and becomes one of the heirs to the family fortune.