Colorado’s Tom Sharp Rides Out of History in Charlie Steel’s Latest Novel

Adventure! Action! Romance! A fast-paced, hard-hitting, and carefully-woven mixture of fact and fiction about Tom Sharp, a respected 1860s Colorado Westerner.

COLORADO, UNITED STATES, September 22, 2023 /EINPresswire.com/ — CONDOR PUBLISHING, INC. is proud to announce the release of TOM SHARP: The Man and the Legend (A Novel) by Internationally published author, Charlie Steel.

Tom Sharp, a seriously wounded Confederate solder, was discharged from his enlistment. He joined a wagon train and traveled west. His goal was to earn his fortune, homestead a ranch, marry Katherine Durrett, the lovely young lady he was betrothed to, and start a family. On his dangerous and exciting quest, Sharp encountered renegades, Indians, and slavers, as well as frontiersmen (those Westerners who taught him how to survive in the mountains and on the plains).

Many of the events that take place in the story are real life adventures that Tom Sharp experienced. Author Charlie Steel engages his craft as a master storyteller and embellishes and adds situations to honor the accomplishments of this great man from Colorado.

Tom Sharp’s life, embellished or not, is a story that needs to be told. He was a soldier, buffalo hunter, meat provider for the California and Oregon gold miners, meat provider for the Union Pacific Railroad workers, and was a multi-line telegraph pole cutter for the railroad—he then worked as a deputy sheriff. In Huerfano County, Colorado, Sharp established and ran a copper stamping mill, built and operated Buzzard Roost Trading Post, bred thoroughbred horses, raised cattle, and was an advocate for Indians, especially Chief Ouray and his band of Utes.

Steel writes a story that rivets the reader creating well-rounded characters that provide a unique and more realistic perspective of the WEST.

*****

As stated by D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW:

“Charlie Steel builds the reputations of all races and both gender through the perceptions and reactions of Tom and those around him as he forges new pathways to connection and understanding while exploring matters of wilderness and the heart. Steel’s gift for storytelling lies in how he paints with a colorful hand heavy to understanding the human reactions and feelings of all characters, no matter their race, color, or gender. This makes for a series of encounters that not only opens eyes on Tom’s influences and why he appears so enlightened in the face of so much prejudice around him, but allows readers to absorb that the Wild West contained not unified figures of any race, but a disparate group of individuals who each harbored their own choices and reasons for undertaking journeys and relating to the unfamiliar, changing world around them.

More so than most Western novels, Tom Sharp’s ability to build understanding from these contrasts and historical precedent lends to a story that is as educational and thought-provoking as it is adventure-filled and character-driven. From the conjoining of families and cooperative efforts to build lives and connections to the forces that try to drive them apart, Tom’s world is buffeted by social and political forces as well as romance and family influences. All these facets keep his life and experiences well rooted in thoroughly absorbing, action-packed scenes that keep shifting even as Tom finds his equilibrium and place in the West.

From the powerful specter of Raine, an Indian woman who becomes a teacher called upon to stand up to a father and wife abuser who enters her classroom to kidnap a child to how bad and good men evolve under the same conditions, Steel creates a host of characters surrounding Tom Sharp who bring their own battles and concerns into his life.

Libraries and readers looking for Western fiction that sparkles with thought-provoking contrasts in belief systems and behaviors, and which defies the usual stereotypes of all kinds of Western figures, will find Tom Sharp: The Man and the Legend not only a powerful addition, but worthy of high recommendation to book club readers examining historical fiction’s potential for revitalizing and revising Western history traditions.”

Gail A Heath
Condor Publishing, Inc.
+1 626-825-1415
[email protected]
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TOM SHARP: THE MAN AND THE LEGEND (A Novel) by Charlie Steel | Historical Fiction Book Trailer 2023