Winner of the 2009 Spur Award for Long Fiction Seventeen-year-old Ned Thorne lied his way into the U.S. Army, and is sent to the remote Fort Ramsey, deep in Arizona Territory. There, his young eyes will be opened to the true beauty and savage barbarity of the American frontier. When a local ranch is attacked by Apaches and a young woman taken into bondage, Ned and the rest of his patrol will endure a suicidal march through mountains and wilderness, into the badlands of Mexico, and beyond the limits of human endurance to save the woman's life. Few will survive this quest-and those who do will be forever changed. ""Shavetail" is the story of the futility of war and is as immediate and brutal as daily news from Iraq or Afghanistan, although the year is 1871 and the place is southern Arizona and northern Mexico. Cobb presents the landscape, the characters, and the conflict with absolute authority, producing a magnificent story in the tradition of Stephen Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage" and Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian."" -- Richard Shelton, author of "Going Back to Bisbee" "The education to which Thomas Cobb's eager young soldier is forced to submit combines such wisdom, pain, suspense, and nasty good humor that I simply couldn't read this book fast enough. Of course I didn't know what a 'shavetail' was when I began, but learning that was only part of the education I was treated to. Guilt and innocence, blood and tenderness -- I can't imagine any reader who could resist." -- Rosellen Brown, author of "Civil Wars" Thomas Cobb was born in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in Tucson, Arizona, where he spent most his childhood in the desert. He is the author of the novels Shavetail and Crazy Heart , as well as Acts of Contrition , a collection of short stories that won the 2002 George Garrett Fiction Prize.