When bullets fly, sometimes the best weapon is a brain.
Yale astronomer Theodore Pembroke came to Wyoming to map stars. A clerical error made him Federal Marshal of Moon Creek—the deadliest town west of the Mississippi, where the last three lawmen died in increasingly creative ways.
Armed with a telescope, borrowed spectacles, and an alarming tendency to lecture outlaws about physics during shootouts, Teddy must survive long enough to bring order to chaos. Moon Creek seethes with corruption: Mayor Buford's stranglehold on the town, Chicago gangsters, and enough gunpowder to level half the territory.
But Teddy has advantages no frontier marshal has ever possessed. He predicts crime patterns like eclipses, designs traps using thermodynamics, and once talked a robber into surrendering by explaining ricochet angles until the man begged him to stop.
With unlikely allies—the enigmatic Chess Freeman, sharp-tongued Dr. "Bill" Sutter, and quietly observant Mei-Lin Chen—he'll prove that sometimes the scientific method is the deadliest weapon in the West.
And when a telegram arrives about a fallen star in outlaw territory, Teddy will discover that some mysteries require both a marshal's badge and an astronomer's eye...
A wildly inventive Western comedy where Newtonian physics meets frontier justice.
