If catfish had nine lives

Betts Winston has inherited more than her cooking skills from her grandmother, she can also see and talk to ghosts of people that once roamed the streets of Broken Rope, Missouri, in the days of the Old West. With Gram's Country Cooking School on spring break, Betts and Gram are taking part in this year's cowboy poetry convention, offering lessons on frying catfish over an open campfire. But when a staged gunfight ends in real death and her brother Teddy becomes a prime suspect, Betts may be the one to jump from the frying pan into the fire. After her ghostly guardian Jerome appears to watch her back and a spectral Pony Express rider gallops into town with some unfinished business, Broken Rope starts to seem more like a cowboy ghost convention. With trouble on both sides of this mortal coil, it's up to Betts to clear her brother, put the spirits to rest, and make sure the true killer doesn't become the one who got away.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.