Ann Parker Books In Order

Silver Lies

As 1879 draws to a close, this Rocky Mountain boomtown has infected the world with silver fever. It’s not much different than the dot. com mania or the corporate scams that heat up over a century later.

Unfortunately for Joe Rose, a precious metals assayer, death stakes its own claim. Joe’s body is found trampled into the muck behind Inez Stannert’s saloon. Inez already had much more to deal with than pouring shots of Taos Lightning and cleaning up a corpse. A lady educated on the East Coast, she has a past that doesn’t bear close scrutiny, including her elopement with a gambling man who has recently disappeared.

Most townsfolk, including Inez’s business partner, Abe Jackson, dismiss Joe’s death as an accident. Death, after all, is no stranger in Leadville. But Inez wonders: Why was this loving husband and father carrying a brass token good for ‘one free screw’ at the parlor house of Denver madam Mattie Silks?

When Joe’s widow Emma asks Inez to settle Joe’s affairs, almost against her will, Inez uncovers skewed assays, bogus greenbacks, and blackmail. Lies and secrets run deep in Colorado, secrets more likely to lead to a hanging than to today’s congressional hearings or country club prisons for the crooked and the greedy. Then again, maybe Joe’s murder was purely personal…
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Iron Ties

The railroad is coming west, all the way to Leadville and its rich Rocky Mountain mines, not to mention millionaires. And who is coming to celebrate the arrival of the Denver & Rio Grande but Ulysses S. Grant, 18th President of the United States and former commander of the Union armies. Like other residents in the Colorado boom town this summer of 1880, Inez Stannert regards the news as mixed. With her business partnership in the Silver Queen Saloon shaky and the bonds of family tightening her husband is still missing and her baby is still back East, Inez doesn’t need the lawlessness of Leadville to turn, once again, into murder. But Inez isn’t the only one with Iron Ties to the past. Some folks have wicked memories of the war, others a stake in the competing railroad lines. And Inez’s friend, photographer Susan Carothers, gets caught in the crossfire…
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Leaden Skies

In the summer of 1880, the siren song of a lucky silver find in the mining boomtown of Leadville, Colorado, isn’t the only thing that leads folks into temptation. Although possible investment in Leadville’s silver mines is a main reason that former president and Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant is now touring this city at the top of the Rockies, others in his retinue and in town are enticed by other visions. Political aspirations fuel the dreams of young John Quincy Adams Wesley and his mother, while itinerant fire insurance mapmaker Cecil Farnesworth struggles against the seductive call of State Street, Leadville’s red light district.
As part owner of the Silver Queen Saloon, Inez Stannert has often observed the ruination that comes from yielding to temptation. Still, that knowledge hasn’t stopped Inez from taking Reverend Justice Sands as her lover, in the absence of news of her missing husband. Nor does it stop her from striking a backroom deal with upscale brothel madam Frisco Flo, a deal that Inez gambles will make her financially independent.
But when the body of Lizzie, one of Flo’s women, is discovered and Inez learns that Flo has another silent business partner, whose identity she will not divulge, Inez begins to have second thoughts. Inez, in a race against time to untangle the dealings of the high and the low during Grant’s visit, must also face her own demons from the past, even as she fights to save her reputation and her life.