Forgotten Rose is my thirty-eighth western/frontier novel. I wrote it in the late fall of 2024, finishing just before New Year, and it was published in April 2025 as an e-book and paperback by Wolfpack Publishing. It is the third novel in a three-book series featuring Jess Delaine.

In Forgotten Rose, Jess Delaine responds to an invitation from a Mexican family in Overton (scene of the first Delaine novel), by way of Delaine’s girlfriend, Rachel Valera, to offer advice to a man from Trinidad, Colorado, who is looking for his daughter, who eloped with a young man. Rachel’s friends think that Delaine, knowing the main routes of travel, the countryside, and the way of life in Wyoming, could help the man, Tiburcio Martínez, in his search. The gruff man turns down the offer, however, so Delaine goes on his way to a neighboring locale, near the town of Sayers, to work on a ranch.

Delaine has hired on to work with antelope hunters and deer hunters and then to help with fall roundup. When the group is out on the first night at antelope hunting camp, Tiburcio Martínez shows up, quite a ways off the main trail. He speaks good English and says he is looking for his eloped daughter.

Delaine and his fellow workers help the antelope hunters get their animals, and while the group is on the way to town, they happen upon the body of Mr. Martínez, laid out on the trail.

As Delaine and the other workers prepare for deer hunting, a second man from Trinidad, Colorado, shows up. This man, Pedro Cuenca, is a nephew of the deceased. He is self-assured and condescending, and he says he is looking for information regarding his uncle. At the end of the deer hunting segment, this man, too, is discovered dead out in the country. 

In the meanwhile, in conversations with an unsavory character in the saloon, Delaine has heard insinuations about a sex trafficking operation in which men transport women to work in lumber camps and mining camps. When a man who says he is a field scientist studying migratory birds turns up dead in town, people wonder if his death has any connection to the other two.

Comes now a third man from Trinidad, Colorado, a man named Miguel Cuenca, brother of the second dead man. He has a nephew with him, so he does not go alone, but Delaine still has the presentiment that he, too, could end up with a short life. At this point, the ranch crew moves into fall roundup.

As I mentioned in the comments on Broken Horn, I decided during the planning for this series what kinds of crimes the main character would deal with. I settled in the general area of missing persons, kidnapped persons, and human trafficking. In Forgotten Rose, some readers may see a correlation between the exploitation of animal life in hunting and ranching and the exploitation of humans in another kind of commerce.

As in his other stories, Delaine has to make the connections to find out why men are dying and why one shifty character makes a move against him. In the process, Delaine has a moment of awareness in which he realizes he is an amateur detective. This goes along with the idea expressed at the end of Broken Horn, that he considers himself a regular citizen. Again we have an example of an average person, not a superhero, who is able to assert capability, solve problems, and help achieve justice.

As a regular part of my preparation for writing a work such as this, I did some background reading. As is my practice, I read a bit of a variety, including a western by a contemporary woman writer and a mystery by a contemporary male writer, both of which I thought could have been better (hence the anonymity) but which helped me reinforce some of my own stylistic preferences; Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, which I had begun about ten years earlier and could not stick with but which I bore down and read with patience; and Alice Munro’s Friend of My Youth, of which I had read the title story a few times. I also watched a few 

movies, including noir movies I kind of came across, a couple of average westerns, and acclaimed movies such as The Homesman and The Searchers. 

As another part of my preparation, I went on a field trip to observe the kind of country in which the story would take place. This time, I went to an area not far from the area where I set Lost Canyon but with a different landscape, most of it broad grassland where I could set the scenes for antelope hunting and beef roundup, with hills and ridges where I could set the deer hunting scenes and the lookout from which Delaine sees the title character. 

As noted in my comments on Lost Canyon and Broken Horn, Wolfpack Publishing has been very good to work with on this series as well as on other work of mine. I hope this novel and the others meet with success.

Forgotten Rose is available at Amazon.

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