Paper

Paper is NOT your average novel about the Wild West. Although it is not without a few gun battles, it really is about powerful people willing to present their own ＂truth＂ as reality to get what they want. One such person is Bat Masterson, who is not afraid to use a sheriff’s badge to get what he wants in Dodge City. While supposedly working to keep law and order, he secretly leads the Dodge City Gang and gets rich on the proceeds of crime. Another is newspaperman Ransome Cooper, who has no trouble fabricating news stories to fill in the space around the advertising he sells for the Dodge City Fable. But advertising also has its own ＂truth＂, as Una, a young woman from Texas will discover. After seeing a job ad, Una decides to flee the stifling religious household in which she has grown up and start afresh in Dodge City.

To get there, Una must face the dangers of a late-season cattle drive in 1886. Along the way, she meets carpenter John Barringer and his new wife, Fannie May, who are running from their own troubles. As a trio, they must depend on each other and their wits to survive-along with a strategy developed by Fannie May, which she has based on the Rock, Paper, Scissors game.

Paper is the second book in the exciting historical fiction series Rock Paper Scissors by Montgomery Colt, but it can also be enjoyed as a standalone novel. As in his first book, Colt adeptly weaves real historical players (such as Bat Masterson, George Hoover, Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, and Buffalo Bill Cody) and events with a fictional tale that makes the Wild West come alive, while telling a story that is particularly relevant in modern times.