In 1890 Lieutenant Gabriel Stokes of the British Army left behind the horrors of war for a role in the Metropolitan Police. Though he rose quickly through the ranks, the squalid violence of London’s East End proved just as dark and oppressive as the battlefield.
With his life falling apart, and longing for peace and meaning, Gabriel leaves the grime of London behind and heads for the wide open spaces of the American West.
He soon realises that the wilds of Oregon are far from the idyll he has yearned for.
The Blue Mountains may be beautiful, but with the frontier a complex patchwork of feuds and felonies, and with ranchers as vicious as any back alley cut-throat in London, Gabriel finds himself unable to escape his past and the demons that drive him.
Can he find a place for himself on the far edge of the New World?
Dark Frontier by Matthew Harffy is published in paperback on 16 January, 2025.
Matthew tells Historia about his experience of writing a Western — and how it’s not that different from his earlier novels.
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