The Quivera Trail [Paperback]

The Quivera Trail is intended as a sequel to the Adelsverein Trilogy, as it picks up in 1875, with Dolph Becker courting and marrying a young Englishwoman, Isobel Lindsay-Groves. Isobel has several problems, the first of them being a domineering and cruelly judgmental mother, and the second, that she has made a dreadful hash of her debut year and failed to marry - marry well, or marry anyone at all. She is plump, socially inept, loves dogs and horses and wishes wistfully for a quiet modest country life. Texas cattle rancher Dolph Becker is the answer to a prayer, for he offers all that ... but the price for escape from a gilded world of privilege and the casual malice of her mother and Society ... is to marry a man she barely knows, and follow him to Texas. Accompanying Isobel on the journey to her new home in Texas is Jane Goodacre, her personal maid and confidant. Jane, the daughter of a small country shop-keeper, also has ambitions - and talents that she hardly suspects. The limitations and expectations for a young working-class woman in Victorian England weigh very heavily on Jane, although she does not realize how heavily until she and her lady mistress arrive in Texas, and slowly but surely begin exploring their new country ... and what they themselves are capable of achieving.

Dolph Becker's uncle Hansi Richter, the 'cattle baron' as he is now called, has plans for Dolph and Isobel to establish a new ranch near the Palo Duro, in the Panhandle region. Once the winter refuge of the Comanche, the Palo Duro is now open to ranchers and settlers like their neighbor, Charles Goodnight. Dolph and Hansi Richter have an English investor for this new property - but after a long-trail drive to get there and the labor of establishing it from the ground , they discover that not all dangers of the frontier are banished. The Becker and Richter families are soon embroiled in a vendetta with a vicious rustler gang.

Jane, meanwhile, finds a new outll#