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Raised in the lap of luxury by her adoring father, eighteen-year-old Lorinda Jameson gets the shock of her life when she's left orphaned and with a mountain of debt - including huge gambling debts to the Black Hand mafia, who are determined to kill or maim anyone who can't repay. A family friend arranges for Lorinda to travel west and take employment as a Harvey girl, and now going by the name of Etta Place she serves meals to diners in Grand Junction Colorado. Everything goes well in her new life until the son of the local mine baron lusts after the beauteous Etta and she ends up imprisoned and convicted of murder. Friends break her out of jail and she finds herself in the midst of the Hole-in-the-wall gang and the rest is history (well sort of).

I really like the whole concept of telling the "what if" story of Etta, as so little is known about her and I very much enjoyed the first half of the book, but the second half kind of fell apart in the believability factor. I won't get into spoilers, but the relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt in particular was quite a stretch especially without any real documentation to back it up, as well as Sundance's changed political views once they went to Argentina.

All in all an entertaining, albeit light read. The characters of Butch Cassidy, Sundance and his beloved Etta and the dastardly evil Kid Curry (although I did have a hard time reconciling him to the Kid in that beloved TV Show Alias Smith and Jones) were all good fun, as well as the never-give-up Pinkerton detective Siringo. Like a couple other reviewers, I do feel that some editing on the sentence structure would well advised, although my real quibble is the use of news articles, Etta's diary, letters to give the story a feel of "real history" and move the story along were very distracting and upset the flow of the book. I'd have preferred to leave those out and just focus on the story through the POV of Etta and Sundance, but then that's just my opinion and why I'm giving it three instead of four stars. A good first outing though for this author, and I'm curious to see what he'll write about next.