Jeremiah Elzer Releases Debut Historical Western Love on the Frontier

From a Mississippi plantation to the post-war frontier, a Western with a Black woman outlaw at its center

NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, May 6, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Author Jeremiah Elzer announces the release of his debut historical novel, Love on the Frontier, the story of a young woman born into slavery in 1844 Mississippi who escapes west and reinvents herself as the outlaw Mary "Slim." Set across the antebellum South and the post-Civil War American frontier, the novel is a story of survival, identity, and the price one woman is willing to pay to claim her own life.

When Mary learns the figure her father has named for the plantation that still holds her mother, she sets out to earn it any way she can. Her path leads her through bounty hunting, stagecoach raids, and a partnership with a former ranger named Trevor that will decide both their fates. The novel braids two timelines, Mary's flight from Mississippi and Trevor's road from lawman to outlaw, into a single collision on a Nebraska bank floor.

The book moves across more than two decades and a continent's worth of country, from cotton fields in Mississippi to bounty country in Kansas, from a winter shack in the Rockies to a Dakota stagecoach ridge. It sits at an unusual crossroads in the Western canon, an antebellum-South origin grafted onto a post-war frontier story, with a Black woman as the outlaw at its center. The result is a novel that reads as both a Western and a reckoning with what the West was built on top of.

"The thematic journey was Ownership, Autonomy, Identity," Elzer says of the structure. "The frontier becomes symbolic, not a location. It's also something that's never really seen in most Western novels."

Mary's evolution from runaway to bounty hunter to outlaw is shaped by the people she meets along the way, including the petty thief Jasper, who teaches her how to disappear before she walks out on him with everything they stole. Of Jasper, Elzer says: "His survival method is built on fear, while hers evolves beyond it. She outgrows him before he could use her in his own way."

Love on the Frontier is now available on Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardcover, and ebook.

About the Author
Jeremiah Elzer is a debut historical fiction novelist who places Black protagonists at the center of American Western narratives. Love on the Frontier is dedicated to his late grandmother.

Guy Rinzema
Aster & Ink
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