MUCH ADO ABOUT GRUBSTAKE

Rustle up a feisty, independent 16-year-old-girl named Arley who runs a rundown boarding house for three oddball, panned-out gold miners; a stranger dressed in black who rides into town on a black horse; a silver-tongued city slicker who offers to pay big bucks for tapped-out mines; a handsome newspaper editor wooed, to Arley’s chagrin, by prissy, pretty Lacey dressed in dimity and lace gloves; and a baker named Wing Lee, known for his Chinese medicinal teas. Plunk them all down in a grubby down-on-its-luck mining town in Colorado in 1888, add a sassy woman saloon keeper and an abandoned mail-order bride, and you’ve got one heck of a rousing “oater.” Packed with quirky characters, a villain or two, unlikely romances and likable, spunky gals (minus one) as sharp as six-shooters, this wallop of a tale is plotted with pitfalls, petticoats, poison and pistols, but glints with the golden prospect of treasure. Twenty-four carat fun. (Historical fiction. 10-14)