Beyond the Deep Blue Horizon

She walked into the Carthage store with her Colt already drawn.

Missouri, 1881. Josie Red Sky rides out of Carthage an outlaw, and the Black girl who worked that store rides with her.

Josie has an English accent from her foster mother, a black Quarter Horse called Blueboy, and a shotgun pellet graze where part of her left ear used to be. Cheyenne-born, she knows exactly what a Missouri court will do with a Cheyenne woman and a teenage Black girl. So she takes Jessie and runs north.

This is a traditional Western with two women in the saddle: a storekeepers' scheme, two bushwhackers on an empty wagon road, a cave shelter while a tornado passes overhead, and a Kearney saloon where Jessie draws and Josie keeps her hand off her Colt. Back in Carthage, the mayor makes sure the newspaper prints his version of events. And behind them rides US Marshal Jethro Cobb on his chestnut mare Rosie, a lawman who rewrites his own orders from arrest to understand.

Josie has a rule she learned the hard way: ready, aim, fire - never the other way round. Jessie has no surname and wants one thing from the world: schooling. Josie wants the border. Jessie wants reading, writing, and a future with her name on it. But will they get it?

A story about prejudice, personal responsibility and what it means to treat someone as though they are worth something - with real gunplay, period language faced head-on, and a hopeful heart. Beyond the Deep Blue Horizon is the first novel in the Josie Red Sky trilogy.