The daughter of a wealthy oilman must assemble a rescue posse when her stepmother and half-brother are kidnapped in Henna’s historical thriller.

Eliza Jane Patton was only 12 years old when her father, Harold James Patton, took her to Hog Creek, brought out her late mother’s gun, and began training her to be a sharpshooter. Harold, a self-made man who owns a newspaper empire and has vast, oil-rich land holdings, has learned the hard way that one must always be alert to the dangers of life. Now, 11 years later in 1904, Harold is campaigning to be governor of Texas. He has remarried, and he and Kathleen Durant have a 6-year-old son, William “Will” Durant Patton. Several years earlier, Will was stricken with measles, which left him blind. Now, there are other problems—Harold faces vicious enemies trying to sabotage his election. He sends Kathleen and Will to New Orleans to keep them safe and leaves Eliza Jane in charge while he departs on a campaign mission. Kathleen and Will’s train is attacked, and they are kidnapped. Several days later, Whitfield Constantinople Lincoln, a friend from Eliza Jane’s teenage days now working as an attorney for the railroad, appears in Harold’s office to tell her about the kidnapping. They form a search party with Harold’s loyal ranch-hands, and the hunt is on. Henna’s occasionally madcap adventure, filled with turn-of-the-century, Texas-twang-inflected language (“I grew up on a sunny September afternoon in the time it takes a spine to splinter”), is composed in three voices; the story is alternately narrated by the wily Harold, the formidable Eliza Jane, and young Will, whose imaginative, precocious ramblings are both humorous and poignant. There is plenty of excitement to keep the pages turning, along with a bit of tragedy, a couple of gunfights, an especially demonic bad guy, and a ransom-obsessed, mentally unbalanced female kidnapper. The budding romance between Eliza Jane and Whitfield is engaging, and a late-in-the-game revelation of betrayal will leave readers gasping.

Entertaining and a tad quirky, with a sturdy female protagonist.