All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories
Born into slavery in Tennessee, the remarkable “Stagecoach Mary” Fields was a larger-than-life figure who cherished her independence, yet formed a deep bond with the Ursuline Sisters, traveling to their Montana mission in 1885 and spending the last thirty years of her life living there or in nearby Cascade. Mary is believed to have been the first Black woman in the country to drive a U.S. Postal Star Route, the source of her nickname.
In All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories, Agatha Award-winning author Leslie Budewitz brings together three short stories, each originally published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, imagining the life of Stagecoach Mary in her first year in Montana, and a novella exploring her later life, including: “All God’s Sparrows,” winner of the 2018 Agatha Award for Best Short Story; “Miss Starr’s Good-bye,” a nominee for the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Derringer Award; “Coming Clean,” a finalist for the Western Writers of America’s 2021 Spur Award for Best Short Story; and “A Bitter Wind,” a brand-new novella in which Mary helps a young woman newly arrived in the valley solve the mystery of her fiancé’s death and his homesteading neighbors’ bitterness toward him.
Leslie Budewitz tells stories about women’s lives, seasoned with friendship, food, a love of history and the land, and a heaping measure of mystery. In addition to her historical short fiction, she writes the Spice Shop mysteries set in Seattle’s Pike Place Market and the Food Lovers’ Village mysteries, set in NW Montana. As Alicia Beckman, she writes moody suspense. A past president of Sisters in Crime, she lives in NW Montana with her husband and a big gray tuxedo cat. Find out more about her, find buy links for her books, read excerpts, and join her newsletter community at her website.
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