Santiago Toole is the sheriff at Miles City, in frontier Montana. He 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. Toole is summoned out of town to a trail drive camp, to tend to an injured man. But he finds that the man has been shot. And other cowboys have also been shot. And the boss man, Hermes Bragg, is dying of consumption. Toole finds himself dealing with some of the most bull-headed drovers ever to come up the trail from Texas. And the worst of them all is the boss's daughter, Athena Bragg, who is not going to slow down the cattle drive for anything, least of all Sheriff Toole. The Final Tally is one of Richard Wheeler's four celebrated Santiago Toole novels. Others in the Santiago Toole Series are: "Deuces and Ladies Wild," "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.
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.
