Tangled Trails

In the crystalline hush of a Yukon dawn, Corporal Jack Borden shoulders more than a carbine—he bears the phantom weight of a murdered comrade whose blood still steams on virgin snow. The assassin, a velvet-tongued stock-jockey named Jules Loring, has slithered south to Manhattan’s gaslit underbelly, hawking certificates for a gold reef that exists only in the fog of prospectors’ dreams. Borden, laconic as frostbite, follows the spoor through tenement corridors where violin music weeps into the stale beer, and finds an unlikely ally in Blanche Hall, a cabaret siren whose mascara can’t hide the bruises of a thousand broken promises. Their hunt detonates in a Bowery cellar of flayed knuckles and shattered chandeliers; Loring slips away, but not before a torn photograph reveals Blanche and Borden’s prairie sweetheart Milly as sisters severed in infancy by a railroad fire. The chase ricochets back across the border, through avalanche chutes and cathedral forests, until guilt, greed and glacier-cold justice converge on a trestle bridge where two women embrace in the twilight of recognition and a Mountie’s scarred hands finally close around the throat of yesterday’s ghosts.