Billy Gashade: An American Epic

Young Billy Gashade is just 16 years old when the New York draft riots break out in 1863. In the course of saving a wounded policeman from one of Boss Tweed's boys, Billy ends up on the wrong side of the Boss and is forced to flee the city. As he wanders across the continent, he encounters Quantrill's Confederate guerrillas in Kansas, Frank and Jesse James, Wild Bill Hicock, Billy the Kid and General George Armstrong Custer, to name just a few. What makes Loren D. Estleman's Billy Gashade such a pleasure to read is not the historical luminaries that grace his pages but rather his hero's low-key reactions to them. Estleman combines history and fiction with a lively prose style to fashion a book that readers will be eager to recommend--if not lend--to their friends.