Montana. 1927. Gold fields, ghost towns, and a woman who doesn’t take sass from anyone.
Delores Bailey brews moonshine in the mountains of Montana and minds her own business. She’s made peace with being an outsider — too rough for polite society, too independent for a world that keeps trying to push women into smaller spaces. She doesn’t need the approval of Pony Gulch. She just needs to be left alone.
But trouble has a way of finding the one person who knows how to handle it.
The Moonshiner Mysteries are historical crime novels set in the raw, unglamorous frontier of Prohibition-era Montana — not the glittering speakeasies of the East Coast, but the mining camps and gold fields and wide-open spaces where the law is distant and women like Delores carve out survival by sheer force of will.
Each book brings Delores a new murder to untangle, a new injustice that demands she choose between keeping her head down and standing up for someone who can’t stand up for themselves. She always makes the same choice — and she’s always a little surprised that she does.
Gritty, authentic, and filled with the kind of heroine who doesn’t wait to be rescued.
The Series at a Glance
Set in Montana, 1927 (Pony Gulch and Virginia City) Four novels, complete series Protagonist: Delores Bailey, bootlegger, moonshiner, reluctant investigator Her world: gold miners, frontier lawmen, outcasts, and the occasional unexpected ally A recurring thread: Lucie Santoro, schoolteacher, Delores’s unlikely partner in justice — and the protagonist of The Promise Trilogy
Reading Order
Big Sky Murder — Book One Pony Gulch, Montana, 1927. When Delores’s only friend is killed, she’s the obvious suspect. Staying to prove her innocence means trusting people she’s spent years learning not to trust.
Stamp Mill Murder — Book Two A man crushed by machinery at the stamp mill. A girl on the run from a violent father. Delores is asked to help solve one problem and ends up in the middle of both — which is exactly where she doesn’t want to be.
Soiled Dove Murder — Book Three Virginia City. A former student asks Lucie Santoro for help finding a missing Chinese prostitute. When the search becomes a murder investigation, Lucie calls on Delores — and together they fight bigotry, a ruthless tong leader, and a body count that keeps rising.
Whiskey Wars — Book Four Delores’s moonshine still lies in ruins. Someone burned it deliberately. As she digs into the arson and confronts the ghosts of her past, the question stops being who destroyed what she built — and becomes whether she’s ready to stop running from it.
The Connection to The Promise Trilogy
Readers of the Moonshiner Mysteries will recognize Lucie Santoro, who appears in Soiled Dove Murder as Delores’s partner and friend. The Promise Trilogy is Lucie’s origin story — set in 1919 New York, before she ever came to Montana. If you’ve fallen in love with Lucie here, that trilogy will show you who she was before she became the woman Delores relies on.
New to this world? Start with Big Sky Murder and read in order — the series rewards it.
Delores’s Montana is one corner of a much larger world. Explore the history behind all of Sherilyn’s fiction → The Cost of Becoming
The Moonshiner Mysteries is a complete four-book series. All books are available in ebook and print.
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