Doc

In the summer of 1878, the Georgia-born dentist John Henry Holliday arrives in Dodge City, Kansas, sick with the tuberculosis that will kill him in nine years. He sets up a dental practice over a saloon, meets the deputy marshal Wyatt Earp, and falls in with Earp's brothers, the prostitute Kate Harony, and the brothel-keeper Bessie Earp. Russell builds the entire novel around the friendship between Holliday and Earp years before the Tombstone gunfight made both men famous, drawing on a decade of research to give Holliday's Georgia upbringing, classical education, and dental practice equal weight with the gunfights that turned him into a legend.