Deuces and Ladies Wild: A Santiago Toole Western [Paperback]

Richard S. Wheeler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2008

Santiago Toole, the sheriff of Miles City in frontier Montana, is also a doctor but he can't make a living at it. He soon finds that enforcing the law and practicing medicine intertwine in startling ways, and there is as much danger from sick or crazed people as there is from men who heed no law on earth.

Jubal Peach is the gambling king of Miles City, but this isn't enough for him. He wants to own it all, and that includes Miles City Kate's thriving saloon. Sheriff Toole knows there is going to be trouble. Neither Toole or Peach, both hot-tempered characters, is going to back down. And neither one scares easily. It doesn't take too long before bullets fly, blood is spilled, and a lot of bodies dirty up the ground.

Deuces and Ladies Wild is one of Richard Wheeler's four celebrated Santiago Toole novels. Others in the Santiago Toole Series are: The Final Tally, The Fate and Incident at Fort Keogh. Sunstone Press is pleased to republish Richard S. Wheeler's finest novels of the American West, each carefully selected for their enduring value.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Richard S. Wheeler has written about sixty novels of the American West for Doubleday, Forge, Fawcett, Ballantine, Bantam, Pinnacle, New American Library, Walker and Company, and M. Evans. He has received five Spur Awards and holds the Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement in the field of western literature. He is also the author of The Honorable Cody, a novel about Buffalo Bill Cody, and the memoir An Accidental Novelist, both published by Sunstone Press.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Sunstone Press (May 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865346429
• ISBN-13: 978-0865346420
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,061,636 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Richard Wheeler began a late-in-life career as a novelist at age fifty, and by his seventy-fifth year had written seventy novels. He began life as a newsman and later became a book editor, but turned to fiction full time in 1985.

He started by writing traditional westerns but soon was writing large-scale historical novels and then biographical novels. In recent years he has been writing mysteries as well, some as Axel Brand. His Lieutenant Joe Sonntag series occurs in 1940s Milwaukee, and focuses on life in a big, smoky industrial city just after World War Two.

He has won numerous awards, including the Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement in the literature of the American West, and also six Spur Awards from Western Writers of America. He has received more Spur Awards than any other living author.

He grew up in Wisconsin and migrated West, holding newspaper jobs in Phoenix, Oakland, Carson City, and Billings. His wife, Sue Hart, is an English professor at Montana State University in Billings.

He has been focusing more and more on biographical novels. One of these, published in March, 2010, is called Snowbound, and is about the explorer John C. Fremont's tragic fourth expedition. It won a Spur Award.


For a quarter of a century he's largely made his living from writing fiction. That reality astonishes him. In his mid-seventies now, he is still dreaming up new stories.

Note: There are other Richard Wheelers writing books. One is an historian of the Civil War, and another writes histories of the Marine Corps, and another is a social scientist. Richard S. Wheeler is the novelist.