Globe Pequot / Lyons Press
Pages: 272
•
Trim: 5¾ x 8¾
978-1-4930-3511-3 • Paperback • September 2019 • $18.95 • (£12.95)
978-1-4930-2640-1 • eBook • May 2017 • $18.00 • (£11.95)
Subjects: History / United States / State & Local / Midwest (IA, IL, IN, KS, MI, MN, MO, ND, NE, OH, SD, WI),
True Crime / General
Rachel Dickinson is a writer whose work has appeared in numerous publications including The Atlantic, Smithsonian.com, Outside, Men’s Journal, American Way, Aeon, Salon, and Audubon. She has been awarded two Travel Classics awards, an American Society of Journalists and Authors award for best book, a National Endowment for the Humanities Youth Fellowship, and a coveted Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. The author of Falconer on the Edge: A Man, His Birds, and the Vanishing Landscape of the American West, she lives in Freeville, New York.
Evocative prose and rich historical context add depth and broad appeal to this captivating account of the men behind the first-ever robbery of a moving train, their wave of crimes in the 1860s, and their deaths at the hands of vigilantes.
— Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
The law and the Pinkertons couldn’t handle the murderous Reno Gang, America’s first train robbers and outlaw band, or the murderous vigilante mobs who fitted them with ‘hempen collars.’ Finally a great detective is on the case: journalist Rachel Dickinson does them all justice in this fascinating, throat-clinching, true-life narrative of Civil-War era history, crime, and justice for all.”
— Michael Capuzzo, New York Times bestselling author of The Murder Room and Close to Shore: The Terrifying Shark Attacks of 1916
With train robberies, murder, equally bloodthirsty criminals and vigilantes, and a cameo by Abe Lincoln, The Notorious Reno Gang is one of the most entertaining books in years—and it’s all true!
— Jeff Guinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral—And How It Changed the American West
The Reno thugs—‘spiders at the center of a five-hundred-mile web of crime’—filled the moral vacuum following the Civil War with arson, counterfeiting, and train hijacking. Rachel Dickinson has written a compelling narrative of a small town plagued by violence and vice, a microcosm that portrays the issues plaguing many frontier towns in the last half of the nineteenth century. Her prose is spell-binding, and her grasp of the tortured history of American westward settlement is riveting.
— Lisa Alther, New York Times bestselling author of Blood Feud: The Hatfields and the McCoys: The Epic Story of Murder and Vengeance
In this brilliantly authentic account, Rachel Dickinson tells the true story of the original band of bad-boy Wild West outlaws in all their depraved glory—and the relentless man who hunted them down. Vivid, gripping, and a pure delight to read.
— Philip Gerard, author of Secret Soldiers: The Story of World War II’s Heroic Army of Deception