The Big-Town Round-Up

When Clay Lindsay leaves the Arizona range for New York City, he carries two things with him: a cowboy's courage and the wide-open West in his blood. The story opens with pure Western drama, a rampaging steer threatening a young girl in the streets of Manhattan, but instead of riding back to his cattle, Clay finds himself thrust into the neon chaos of the city. What follows is a glittering fish-out-of-water tale as this rough-hewn Arizona cowboy stumbles through a world of subways, society matrons, struggling artists, and penthouse parties. Raine captures turn-of-the-century New York with real verve, the wonder, the absurdity, the loneliness of a man whose natural element is vanishing. The novel crackles with cultural clash: Clay's plain speaking versus urban pretense, his instinct for protection versus a world that doesn't always need saving. But at its heart, this is a story about what happens when you pull a pioneer from his frontier and ask him to survive in a land without horizons.