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Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: AudiobookHub Recommendation
Chapter 2: — Fire in the Orchard
Chapter 3: — A Woman on Deck
Chapter 4: — A Name on the Map
Chapter 5: — The Missing Mudges
Chapter 6: — A Shack, a Key, and New Neighbors
Chapter 7: — What Lives in the Trunk
Chapter 8: — The Sister in the Shadows
Chapter 9: — Winter and the Wolves in Boys’ Clothing
Chapter 10: — The Stranglers’ Shadow
Chapter 11: — At the Blind Pig
Chapter 12: — The Ghost of Eleanor Henry
Chapter 13: — Saying Elizabeth’s Name
Chapter 14: — The Opera House Trial
Chapter 15: — Mercy After the Monster
Chapter 16: — Two Sisters
Chapter 17: — Open the Trunk
Description
When Adelaide Henry sets fire to her family farmhouse and flees California with a locked steamer trunk, she carries more than grief across the map—she carries a family secret. Chasing the promise of “unlimited opportunities,” she claims land on the brutal Montana plains, where wind scours the skin and a life can vanish overnight. Adelaide plans to disappear, to live quiet, to prove up her homestead. But the past lives in that trunk. It breathes. It hungers. And it won’t be left behind.
Victor LaValle’s Lone Women blends historical fiction, frontier survival, and gothic horror into a single, steady breath. We ride with Adelaide through coulees and blizzards, meet neighbors who might be salvation or danger—Grace and her bright, restless son Sam; Bertie Brown and Fiona Wong, a pair of businesswomen who make their own rules; and the Mudge boys, blindfolds off and guns in hand. Behind them all stands the power of Big Sandy’s queen, Mrs. Jerrine Reed, who smiles as she measures a town’s soul.
What begins as a flight becomes a reckoning. Adelaide’s secret has a name. It has a face. And when it finally steps out under the opera house lights, the women of the plains have to decide what kind of town they want to be. This is a story about family—by blood and by choice—about the cruelty of shame and the relief of truth. It’s about monsters we inherit and the ones we make, and the hard work of choosing who to become.
Who Should Listen
- Fans of historical fiction with supernatural edges and moral stakes
- Listeners who loved The Changeling, The Terror, or The Power
- Readers drawn to fierce, complicated heroines and found-family arcs
- Anyone interested in women’s frontier histories told with grit and heart