A Strange Fire

Six weeks before Wounded Knee. One man had to be silenced. One had to be blamed.

November, 1890. Pine Ridge Reservation, Dakota Territory. The Ghost Dance has spread across the plains - a prayer, a ceremony, a last hope that the old world might be restored. The Army calls it a military threat. Colonel Reginald Dast calls it an opportunity.

Lieutenant James Alderton is found dead with a Lakota arrow in his chest. The conclusion is swift: Ghost Dance violence. The 7th Cavalry begins to mass. What no one in authority wants to examine is the medical finding of the reservation doctor - powder burns consistent with a mechanical device, not a bow. Or the fact that Alderton was the most vocal critic of Dast's threat assessment. Or that the arrow came from a confiscated cache stored under Army lock and key.

Reverend Elias Cane rides into Pine Ridge on his circuit and finds a community of people dancing in the cold toward the hope of something that has been taken from them - and a young widow named Wanda Alderton, who has six months of her husband's reports and a clear understanding of who wanted him dead.

Cane has six weeks before something terrible happens. He cannot stop what is coming. But he can make sure the truth about James Alderton is on the record before it does.

A Strange Fire is the seventh and most difficult book in the Circuit Rider Mysteries - a series of religious historical mysteries set in the 1880s American West. This is the most difficult book in the series. It is set against one of the most painful episodes in American history, and it does not look away.

"What does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" - Micah 6:8