You bury - with perfection - what tried to bury you…the betrayals, the lies, the bigotries; the abuse, addiction…the murder.
Ten years later an unknown force digs it all back up for you to deal with.
“No. That’s it. You don’t get it. I have nothing. No family, no home, no one to miss me. I’m tired of this life anyway. Just do me a favor and do it now.” The old man dropped his smirk and stared at the cowboy for a long spell. He got up, walked over to a shelf and took down a bottle Jesse hadn’t noticed before. The old man walked over to him and poured some of it in the open spot on his head. That’s just plain sad, son,” he said. ""I finally met a man more pitiful than me.”
That one question we all ask ourselves at some point in our lives: “Why am I here?” Nine-year-old Jesse’s grief ate at him; so much that he was sorely tempted to follow his family in death after witnessing the tragic event taking them from him.
His grandmother sentenced him not long after, binding him with one message: “You did not give you Life. The Great Spirit did. It is not yours to take.” There it was - sentenced to life in a prison without walls before life ever started.
His grandmother gave him his first lesson. Jesse would give himself the second: How to want to live. And do it alone in a world filled with strangers hating him. For what? He had no idea.
Burned out Jesse McKlintock has nowhere left to go except right back to the place he cut loose from ten years ago in a blind rage. In those ten years he stayed blind drunk. Now he hates himself as passionately as those who betrayed him. He is an old thirty-six needing to winter somewhere. And the chip on his shoulder from years of being hated for his skin is getting mighty heavy.
Getting lost is easy. Finding your way home's the tricky part. The struggle for survival can get messy; and that's for those who care. It gets downright ugly for those that don't. Enter now into Jesse's journey of last resort, pressed onward by an unknown force driving him back to the very ground he'd cursed before leaving it. Jesse crosses paths with a curious character thought to be an assassin named Maxwell Calkinmyer, gets a partially shot off ear by Crazy Mary, and is shaken silly by a curmudgeon named Levon.
A fast-paced telling of one guy discovering love, having it ripped away, and seeing how he deals with all those rough, bittersweet memories. An honest, courageous saga unveiling all the messy sweet ways we interact with those who steal our hearts while breaking them. The rough accounting of cross-racial bloodlines in the lives of our pioneers from early 1800's and on to present day through their stubborn and strong-willed offspring; along with all the hard this life throws at us: addiction, racism, greed, betrayal, loss, and leaving bitter unforgiveness. Throw in an assassin and murder…and there's a tale with more twists and turns than a path cut out by a dizzy toad on loco weed.
Getting There, the first book in the All Roads Lead Home series, reveals Jesse's rich Scot-Wichita heritage as he treks north to Wyoming in order to winter. Not by choice; he'd flat run out of places that would take him. Along the way he travels back in time to his roots where his Native American grandmother's tales are spanning over eighty years across pre-Indian Territory; linking his past, present, and future generations.