From Hell’s Half Acre to Quality Grove, We’re for Smoke tells the wild and woolly story of turn-of-the-century Fort Worth, a cow town on the cusp of becoming a modern industrial city. Told through a series of characters who made the papers for tangles with the law, ranging from high and low society, black and white, male and female, perpetrator and victim, We’re for Smoke reveals a society scrabbling to emerge from the chaotic growing pains of the frontier West.

Readers and fans of The Son by Philipp Meyer, Boardwalk Empire by Nelson Johnson, and Larry McMurtry’s Horseman Pass By would enjoy We’re for Smoke.