BOTB Semifinalist - Lucky, by Beth Henderson

Lucky, by Beth Henderson

Harte Favre will do anything to protect those she loves, but disguising herself as a boy and playing poker to watch over her cousin Yancy has landed her on the eastbound train from Nevada to her uncle’s home in Chicago, where it is hoped she will find a proper husband and cease searching for adventure. Harte isn’t interested in a “proper” husband, but the mysterious Richard Thorton who helps her rescue Yancy repeatedly in the days ahead is a man she is quite interested in. Thorton is leery of women from Harte’s strata, although he can pass as one of the elite himself. He remembers all too well the stews in which he grew up, remembers the years of reinventing himself, of what he has had to give up in becoming the most successful covert Pinkerton operative alive. Alive being the operative word. It is a situation that his cover as a gunman named Thorn, and association with Harte Favre, makes tenuous at best. Particularly when saving Yancy will earn him Harte’s undying love at the same time it sends him back into the world he thought he’d managed to escape: the vice laden district of Chicago known as Hell’s Half Acre.

Sweeping from Virginia City, Nevada, and east along the Central Pacific rails to the saloons and poker tables of Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, then to the slums and ballrooms of Chicago, Illinois in 1877, Lucky is a cross-country trip where love and honor win hands down.


Beth Henderson went the route of self-publishing out of frustration. Although she has had 25 titles published by various New York publishing houses, LUCKY kept getting turned down with comments like, “Love the hero but western settings simply aren’t selling right now.” And yet, every reader she foisted it on loved the book. Rather than put a larger head-sized hole in her office wall, she turned to Lulu.com and reformatted the manuscript as well as created a cover for trade paperback and e-book publication early in 2009. A native of Ohio, she spent 22 years living in the deserts of Arizona and Nevada, and collected a bachelors in History before returning to Ohio to add a masters in English Composition and Rhetoric. Although she has worked as a data entry clerk, a radio traffic director, a graphics layout artist, a retail manager, and a college level professor, when asked her profession the answer is always WRITER.

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