Can the dead speak? Will the living continue on? Ex-priest turned gunman and detective W. W. Ronin must find out before crystal ball gazers and card readers ruin everything for members of the Washoe Club, the Comstock's most prestigious group of millionaires. Revealing the back story of Townsley's popular character, William Washington Ronin, The Pinkerton Years offers a reflective tale of lust and intrigue where the series' fictional characters - Ormsby County Deputy Marcus T. Slade (Dustsucker), Emma Nauman (director of the American Gospel Mission in Carson City) and Happy Hands (a Washoe holy man) - join real-life lawmen U.S. Marshal Augustus Ash and Storey County Sheriff Tom Kelly in dealing with the seamy side of Virginia City's psychic trade in early 1880s Nevada. The Pinkerton Years is a story of misplaced love and affection, virtue and vice in busy Virginia City and Carson City. Nevada history lovers never had it so good as Townsley deftly mixes fact and fiction in this third book in the W. W. Ronin series of Westerns. "Real people. Real places. The way the West was really won."