You've heard Doc Holliday's history, but do you know his story? His name conjures images of the Wild West, of gunfights and gambling halls and a legendary friendship with Wyatt Earp, but before Doc Holliday was a Western legend, he was a Southern Son. The story begins in Civil War Georgia, as young John Henry Holliday welcomes home his heroic father and learns a terrible secret about his mother, with his only confidant his favorite cousin Mattie. As the Confederacy falls and tragedy strikes, John Henry's hero-worship turns to bitter anger and he joins with a gang of vigilantes to chase the Reconstruction Yankees out of their small Georgia town. When their murderous plot is discovered and brings threats of military prison, he vows to change his reckless ways, leaving home to attend dental school in Philadelphia and hoping to become a respected professional man worthy of asking for his cousin Mattie's hand. But when he returns from two years in the North he finds family intrigues, lies and revelations, rivals for Mattie's affections--and a violent encounter that changes everything and starts him on the road to Western legend. Southern Son is the first book in the award-winning Saga of Doc Holliday, an epic American tale of heroes and villains, dreams lost and found, families broken and reconciled, of sin and recompense and the redeeming power of love.
About the Author: Victoria Wilcox is Founding Director of Georgia's Holliday-Dorsey-Fife House Museum (the antebellum home of the family of Doc Holliday, now a site on the National Register of Historic Places), where she learned the family's untold stories of their legendary cousin. Her work with the museum led to two decades of original research, making her a nationally recognized authority on the life of Doc Holliday. She is the author of the documentary film In Search of Doc Holliday, and the award-winning historical novel trilogy The Saga of Doc Holliday for which she twice received Georgia Author of the Year honors and in 2016 was named Best Historical Western Novelist by True West Magazine. She has lectured across the country, appeared in local and regional media, guested on NPR affiliates, and was featured in the Fox Network series Legends & Lies: The Real West. She is a member of the Western Writers of America, Women Writing the West, the Wild West History Association, and the Writer's Guild of the Booth Museum of Western Art and has been a featured contributor to True West Magazine. In the summer of 2017, she joined actor Val Kilmer (Tombstone) as guest historian at the inaugural "Doc HolliDays" in Tombstone, Arizona, site of the legendary OK Corral gunfight.