Miss Ellie's Purple Sage Saloon: Miss Ellie's Purple Sage Saloon

The Wild West: it's where women go to tear off the stays of contemporary morality, battle their demons and find their true selves-their true loves be damned. Set in turn-of-the-century Colorado, Hurd's comical and lyrical women's western breaks the mold. Her frazzled hero, Seth Watkins, is a man besieged. Miss Ellie-the con artist and scam-puller to whom he has given his heart and the keys of the Purple Sage Saloon-won't marry him and keeps throwing him out at gunpoint. His new, ``respectable'' bride, Marta Mae, daughter of Colorado's richest entrepreneur, won't heed him. She's put antimacassars on all the couches at his rustic hunting lodge, and she's leading the townswomen in a temperance fight to close the Purple Sage. Ellie, a fierce freethinker and deadly poker player, is grieving for the little girl she and Seth lost in Abilene because she was judged an ``unfit'' single mother. For her part, Marta Mae believes that her reproductive organs are drying up, little knowing that a doctor destroyed them during an abortion forced on her by her family. But when Marta Mae's temperance ladies threaten her uncle's power base, she and Ellie become ``enemies enjoined,'' determined to do him in and to empower themselves. Hurd, just as quirky, powerful and zealous as her heroines, portrays the causes of both past and present in such fine spunky style that readers are never overwhelmed by her moral clarion. (July)