Mark Lee Gardner – Brothers Of The Gun – Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and a Reckoning in Tombstone

Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday: Legendary gunfighters and friends who gained immortality because of a thirty-second shootout near a livery stable called the O.K. Corral. Their friendship actually began three years before that iconic 1881 gunfight, in the rollicking cattle town of Dodge City. Wyatt, an assistant city marshal, was surrounded by armed, belligerent cowboys. Doc saw Wyatt’s predicament from a monte table in the Long Branch saloon and burst out the door with two leveled revolvers shouting, “Throw up your hands!” The startled cowboys did, and Wyatt and Doc led them off to jail. Wyatt credited Doc with saving his life, and thus began their lasting—and curious—friendship. In this illuminating dual biography, the first about Earp and Holliday, the lives of these two men, one a sometime lawman and the other a sometime dentist, are chronicled in a swirling tableau of saloons, brothels, gambling dens, stage holdups, arrests, manhunts, and revenge killings. And while there’s plenty of gunsmoke in this saga, hero-worshipping won’t be found. Wyatt and Doc, just like anyone else then and now, had their flaws and failings, and the unsavory parts of their lives are here, too.

In Brothers of the Gun, Old West authority Mark Lee Gardner reveals fresh information about Wyatt’s and Doc’s early lives, their famous friendship, the O.K. Corral gunfight, and Wyatt’s controversial “vendetta ride” following the assassination of his brother Morgan. Drawing upon new research into diaries, letters, court records, and contemporary newspaper reports, as well as firsthand observation at several historic sites, this is the definitive book on Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and their enduring bond. Brothers of the Gun is edge-of-your-saddle nonfiction storytelling at its best.

Roben Farzad – Hotel Scarface – Where Cocaine Cowboys Partied and Plotted to Control Miami

In the seventies, coke hit Miami with the full force of a hurricane, and no place attracted dealers and dopers like Coconut Grove’s Mutiny at Sailboat Bay. Hollywood royalty, rock stars, and models flocked to the hotel’s club to order bottle after bottle of Dom and to snort lines alongside narcos, hit men, and gunrunners, all while marathon orgies burned upstairs in elaborate fantasy suites. Amid the boatloads of powder and cash reigned the new kings of Miami: three waves of Cuban immigrants vying to dominate the trafficking of one of the most lucrative commodities ever known to man. But as the kilos—and bodies—began to pile up, the Mutiny became target number one for law enforcement. Based on exclusive interviews and never-before-seen documents, Hotel Scarface is a portrait of a city high on excess and greed, an extraordinary work of investigative journalism offering an unprecedented view of the rise and fall of cocaine—and the Mutiny—in Miami.