Murder and romance collide in the Dakota Territory in 1882. Fans of the television series Deadwood might enjoy The Law & Annabelle.
Penniless with nowhere to go, everything seems lost for young widow Annabelle Miles. A letter from her aunt in the Dakota Territory changes things for Annabelle. She goes on a cross-country adventure that takes her from her home in Baltimore to the gold mining towns of the Black Hills.
After her stage coach stops for the night at a way station, Annabelle witnesses a clandestine meeting to sell a phony diamond mine. The next morning one of the men she saw is found murdered. U.S. Marshal Luke Johnson arrives to investigate the murder and meets the feisty widow with a story to tell. Annabelle is intrigued with the Marshal but convinced that they'll never see each other again. She continues on her journey to visit her aunt, who owns a gold mine near the small community of Red Gorge. Once there, she meets the colorful characters who populate the town and seem alien to her genteel life back east. Even her Aunt Julia seems to have been changed by the vast and rugged wilderness of the west.
As fate would have it, Marshal Johnson's investigation of the way station murder leads him to Red Gorge and Annabelle's doorstep. Their developing romance is threatened when a second murder seems to implicate Aunt Julia as the mastermind behind the phony diamond mine scheme. Even though he doesn't believe she's guilty, Luke arrests Julia hoping to flush out the true perpetrators.