title: Conspiracy
author: Farmer, W. Michael
description: The Fountain murder trial took place in Hillsboro, New Mexico Territory in 1899 for the killing of an eight-year-old boy, Henry Fountain, three years earlier. Pat Garrett, on his last big case, twenty years after he killed Billy the Kid, investigated the murders of Henry and his father Albert, then lost a major gun battle with the defendants when he tried to arrest them.
  
   The trial morphed into a political donnybrook pitting the leading Republican for the prosecution against the leading Democrat for the defense and pitting ranch folk against big time, live-in-town cattle barons. It lasted eighteen days, called over seventy witnesses, and summations ended near midnight. The defense insisted the jury begin deliberations immediately.
  
   Though the events are true history, the story is told through the eyes of a fictional reporter, Quentin Peach from the San Francisco Examiner. Convinced of the defendants’ innocence, Peach investigates players and background stories to learn who actually murdered the Fountains.
  
  
  W. Michael Farmer lives and writes in Smithfield, Isle of Wight County, Virginia. He learned much of the rich story life of the southwest through living in Las Cruces, New Mexico, for nearly fifteen years. As an author of Western historical fiction, he has published short stories in four anthologies, won awards for essays at the Christopher Newport University Writers’ Conference, and published essays in magazines. He wrote the Vanishing Trilogy, the first novel of which, Hombrecito's War, won a Western Writers of America Silver Spur Award for Best First Novel and was a New Mexico Book Award Finalist for Historical Fiction. Hombrecito’s Search and Tiger Tiger Burning Bright: The Betrayals of Pancho Villa complete the trilogy.