Stars and Six-Shooters

When bullets fly, sometimes the best weapon is a brain.Professor Theodore Pembroke thought his biggest challenge would be mapping stars in the Wyoming Territory. Then a clerical error made him Federal Marshal of Moon Creek—the deadliest town west of the Mississippi, where the last three lawmen died in increasingly creative ways.Armed with nothing but a telescope, a Yale education, and an alarming tendency to lecture outlaws about physics during shootouts, Teddy must somehow survive long enough to bring order to chaos. Moon Creek seethes with corruption: Mayor Buford's stranglehold on the town, mysterious Chicago gangsters, and enough gunpowder to level half the territory.But Teddy has advantages no frontier marshal has ever possessed. He can predict crime patterns like eclipses, design traps using thermodynamics, and analyze bullet trajectories with astronomical precision. With unlikely allies—the enigmatic Chess Freeman, the sharp-tongued Dr. Bill Sutter, and the quietly observant Mei-Lin Chen—he'll prove that sometimes the pen truly is mightier than the sword.Even if the pen happens to be calculating the optimal angle for a smoke bomb.A wildly inventive Western where Newtonian physics meets frontier justice, and one man's scientific method becomes the deadliest weapon in the West.