Try Me and See

Dodge City, Kansas, 1872—where buffalo hunters outnumber lawmen and fortunes are built on lies. Widow Abigail Miller arrives at the frontier's deadliest town still battling laudanum addiction following her husband's brutal murder in Quantrill's raid on Lawrence. She plans to wait out winter before continuing to California and a life far from violence.

But when she befriends Lily Belle—trapped in a corrupt land scheme—and Tasiwoo, a Comanche warrior who barely survived the slaughter at Adobe Walls, Abigail discovers she can't walk away from injustice, even when staying could kill her. Their problem is Thomas Dawes, a Confederate veteran whose Fort Dodge Land Trust operates on a dangerous principle: using new investor money to pay off earlier investors while falsifying railroad maps to inflate land values. It's a pyramid scheme decades before such frauds have a name—and Dawes will use surveillance, intimidation, and violence to protect his empire before it collapses.

As innocent settlers and townspeople invest their life savings, Abigail realizes the fraud will destroy everyone caught in Dawes' web. Teaming up with legendary lawmen Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp—still in their early frontier days—she plans to gather evidence and expose him. But investigating a sophisticated financial crime in a town without meaningful law means risking everything. Gathering proof means shadowing dangerous men, riding into wild Kansas territory, and facing an opponent who has already proven he'll kill to protect his secrets.

Based on extensive research of court records and historical documents, Try Me and See reveals how modern financial crime came to the frontier—and the remarkable woman who fought to stop it. Set during the extinction of the great buffalo herds and the final military campaigns against the Comanche, this is Book 2 of The Kansas Trilogy by Kenyon J. Blunt.

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