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by Cynthia Leal Massey (Author)
Death of a Texas Ranger is the thrilling, action-packed story of the murder of Texas Ranger John Green by Cesario Menchaca, one of three Rangers of Mexican descent under Green's command. Immediately word spread that the killing may have been the botched outcome of a contract taken out on Menchaca's life by the notorious Gabriel Marnoch, a local naturalist who had run up against the law himself. But was it? Much more than just a story about a tragic frontier killing, it is the story of an era. The events leading up to the murder and Green's son's decades' long quest for justice for his father's killer exemplify the chaotic frontier society in Texas after the Civil War, a time fraught with political turmoil and cultural clashes. Amidst that chaos, the virgin landscape of Texas was a magnet to those interested in the natural sciences in the nineteenth century, an era often referred to as the Age of Darwin. The clash between the seemingly pastoral landscape with its offerings for science and the brutal history of the region ties this very readable regional history into the larger American story.
Author Biography
Cynthia Leal Massey combines her background in journalism and love of history to write award-winning historical fiction and nonfiction history. A former corporate editor, college instructor, and magazine editor, she has published hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles and several books. She was the 2008 winner of the Lone Star Award for Magazine Journalism given by the Houston Press Club for "Is UT Holding Our History Hostage?" published in Scene in SA magazine. One judge wrote: "In her exhaustive look at the unique battle over the Bexar Archives, writer Cynthia Leal Massey manages to make history come alive, filled with dark plots and do-gooders of yesteryear, and allusions to cattle rustling and murder and more." The article was also a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters O. Henry Award for Best Work of Magazine Journalism. Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry called her novel, The Caballeros of Ruby, Texas, "a vivid picture of the Rio Grande Valley as it was fifty years ago [and] a very good read." Born and raised on the south side of San Antonio, Texas, Massey has resided in Helotes, twenty miles northwest of the Alamo City, since 1994. A full-time writer, she is a past president of Women Writing the West.
