Part of Series
Educated, ambitious, and brilliant in a time not quite ready for her, Jessie elopes with the young explorer Charles Frémont, at the age of 17, defying the wishes of her father, the powerful Senator Thomas Hart Benton. Jessie expected a life of boundless adventure. Instead, the two most important men in her life are about to alter the course of 19th century American history—but only with her help. REVIEWS: "Lulls the reader into forgetting this is fiction." ~Publishers Weekly REAL WOMEN OF THE AMERICAN WEST, in series order Libbie Sundance, Butch and Me Cherokee Rose Jessie ABOUT JUDY ALTER: Judy Alter is an award-winning author who enjoys writing about women of the American West. Winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award and the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement, Judy also enjoys writing mysteries. A single mother of four and the grandmother of seven, Judy and her Bordoodle dog call Fort Worth, Texas home.
Author
After an established career writing historical fiction for adults and young adults about women of the nineteenth-century American West, Texas author Judy Alter turned her attention to contemporary cozy mysteries and wrote three series: Kelly O’Connell Mysteries, Blue Plate Café Mysteries, and Oak Grove Mysteries. She has most recently published two titles in her Irene in Chicago Culinary Mysteries—Saving Irene and Irene in Danger. Her most recent historical books are The Most Land, the Best Cattle: The Waggoners of Texas and The Second Battle of the Alamo, a study in both Texas and women’s history. Judy’s western fiction has been recognized with awards from the Western Writers of America, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the National Cowboy Museum and Hall of Fame. She has been honored with the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement by WWA and inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame at the Fort Worth Public Library. She was named One of 100 Women, Living and Dead, Who Have Left Their Mark on Texas by the Dallas Morning News, and named an Outstanding Woman of Fort Worth in the Arts, 1988, by the Mayor’s Commission on the Status of Women Judy is a member Sisters in Crime and Guppies, Women Writing the West, Story Circle Network, a past president of Western Writers of America, and an active member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Retired after almost thirty years with TCU Press, twenty of them as director, Judy lives in a small cottage—just right for one and a dog—in Fort Worth, Texas with her Bordoodle Sophie. She is the mother of four and the grandmother of seven. Her hobby is cooking, and she’s learning how to cook in a postage-stamp kitchen without a stove. In fact, she wrote a cookbook about it: Gourmet on a Hot Plate.
