Bed of Thorns — Lee Mossel

When Rose Schirrack makes a bad decision, the consequences leave her unmarried, pregnant, and abandoned in Cincinnati at the turn of the 20th century. Her next decision--to accept a job as the madam of a brothel--starts her down a path destined to be paved with regrets. While learning the ropes of running an upscale bordello, Rose is thrown into a world of hard men, prostitutes, racism, and misogyny. Along the way, she makes another bad choice in men. Betrayed by her lover and a victim of her own avarice, Rose is cast adrift once more. Hoping to escape her past and start a new life, she tries her hand at running a cafe in the thriving river port of New Albany, Indiana. With improving prospects including a possible marriage to a successful farmer; a father for her sons, Rose once again has a future. That future is suddenly dashed and she is thrown back into a maelstrom of financial and personal ruin. Clutching at straws to find a way...anyway...out, Rose agrees to have dinner with a new customer of her cafe: Ralph Groot. Groot, a charming Dutch immigrant with a taste for cards, shares his dream of leaving his life of gambling, punctuated with stretches of manual labor to pay his bills, for a farm in Montana. Rose strikes a hasty bargain with Groot to finance his dream in return for taking her and the boys to Montana...another chance to escape her past before her sons are old enough to begin asking questions. From the start, their first night in their new home of Stanford, Montana, things go poorly. Groot alienates Rose's sons, Joseph and Frank; and ruins any chance of a romantic relationship with Rose by drinking and gambling away the night. What started as a financial partnership with the promise of much, much more becomes a tenuous, strife filled existence. Rose needs Groot to farm while Groot needs the wages and promise of a financial payout. The growing independence and distrust of Joseph and Frank add to the tension of the makeshift "family." Ev Marion, a cowboy, who trades his drawings and an occasional painting for drinks at the Little Belt Saloon in Stanford, befriends Rose in more ways than one and she confides her darkest secrets to him. When Groot and Frank violently clash, Rose throws Groot off the farm which sets him on a path of despair for his unrequited love, feelings of being short changed, and a desperate yearning for revenge. With Ev as her partner, Rose reluctantly returns to the most lucrative trade she knows. Teaming up with the sheriff of Great Falls, the three set about creating the most luxurious and unique brothel in Great Falls. BED OF THORNS plays out with undercurrents of obsession, racism, misogyny, money, and sex against a backdrop of frontier Montana. The evolution of the characters, as they confront their fears and their failings, is magnified by violence, insanity, and the thirst for revenge."