John Henry (Doc) Holiday and his cousin, Mattie, are childhood lovers held apart by religion (her family is Catholic while his is Presbyterian) and consanguinity (they are first cousins). Doc moves West in an attempt to cure his tuberculosis but continues a long-term correspondence with his true love. In his absence, she becomes a nun. When he succumbs to the disease, she says she destroys their letters; however, they are eventually recovered from a safe deposit box belonging to the family of one of Mattie’s family’s slaves and left to a young woman, Rayella Vargas. These letters may or may not be genuine, and in fact, the book never clearly says one way or another. Tuck Mercer, a former rodeo rider turned art forger turned expert in authenticating artifacts from the Old West, tries to sell them for Vargas with the assistance of a creative property lawyer, Lisa Balamaro. The potential buyer, a judge from Tucson, nabs the letters when Balamaro takes them to him to inspect, setting off a black ops type operation run by Vargas’s boyfriend and Tuck in a modern-day reenactment of the shootout at the OK Corral.
The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holiday is a genre-bending blend of romance, black-ops, art forgery, art heist, and thriller. The historical details here are accurate as are the contemporary aspects of vigilante groups protecting the US border from illegal immigrants. And the descriptions of the Arizona landscape are breathtaking. Through the interspersed letters between Holiday and Mattie, the reader gets some insights into both the famed gunslingers and his relationship with his true love as well as into the parallel relationship between Tuck and his own long-lost love, Melanie.
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The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holiday (Square Tire Books, August 21, 2023) is available through:
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