A Good Man

A Good Man

Guy Vanderhaeghe

#7927 of 8,085 books · #1044 in Historical Fiction

Longlisted for the Giller Prize (2011).

Guy Vanderhaeghe's A Good Man returns to the nineteenth-century Canadian and American West to explore the waning days of one of the world's last great frontiers. Wesley Case, a former soldier and the son of a Canadian lumber baron, sets out into the untamed borderlands between Canada and the United States to escape a dark secret from his past. He settles in Montana where he hopes to buy a cattle ranch, and where he begins work as a liaison between the American and Canadian military in an effort to contain the Native Americans' anger in the wake of the Civil War. Amid the brutal violence that erupts between the Sioux warriors and U.S. forces, Case's plan for a quiet ranch life is further compromised by an unexpected dilemma: he falls in love with the beautiful, outspoken, and recently widowed Ada Torr. It's a budding romance that soon inflames the jealousy of Ada's deeply disturbed admirer, Michael Dunne. When the American government unleashes its final assault on the Indians, Dunne commences his own vicious plan for vengeance in one last feverish attempt to claim Ada as his own.