One Trick Pony

A sweeping, gritty, sexy debut novel set in Wyoming that follows two families over more than a hundred years, telling a story of rodeo stars, roughnecks, and ranchers, along with the hard-drinking, hard-loving women who make their lives in a part of the west determined to break their hearts.

The brain in love is not to be trusted. August Sheehan knows that, but she’s still a teenage girl, drunk on love for the neighbor kid, leaving him notes snagged on the barbed wire fence between their properties. When a dust storm blows through, stranding August’s father in town, she finally lets George Mooney into her bed and wakes up with a gun in her face, betrayed for the oil claim beneath her family’s land.

So begins a rivalry between the Sheehan and Mooney families that will rip across their Wyoming properties for generations: from Mick Sheehan, a rodeo star who steals his best friend Ray Mooney’s girl, to Meg Sheehan and Brooke Mooney, close as sisters, running their ranches side-by-side, to Jessie Mooney, hired hand at a dude ranch that sells the cowboy experience to wealthy tourists, and far beyond, to an imagined future, where the last of the Sheehans lives on the desiccated wasteland of his ancestral Wyoming home, now a desert ruined by drilling and fracking, afraid his own heart might have dried up alongside the land, until hope arrives in a pickup truck.

As profound as it is uproariously profane, One Trick Pony is a Wyoming epic, a love letter and an elegy to a dying American landscape, written with the swagger, the grit, and the heart of a cowgirl.