The Games We Play (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781955162357)

This is the ninth book in the historic fiction series created by Kathleen Haun. The main characters from the previous books come together for a poker tournament in June of 1888 at a ranch in the lush green meadows of Bridgeport, California. We see again Lucy, Jim and Roger Murphy from Virginia City, and are reminded that they had become friends with Emily and Frank Eastman, as well as Charlotte and Vince Perry from Lone Pine. Some of the gamblers who come together for what they expect to be a high-stakes "poker tournament" are friends, and some we are told are meeting for the first time. But the one thing they all have in common is that they have something in their pasts they would like to keep hidden. Unfortunately, some of these men won't be leaving the ranch alive. Along with the tension created by a weekend upended by shock and tragedy, the reader gets a close look at the way life was in a frontier town that exists today much as it did back in "the good old days" of the late 1800's, including a visit to Bodie, California, as its big mining boom is fading into history.