Press Kit

Sharron S. Davidson grew up on ranches in New Mexico. Her grandparents and parents were ranching people — her grandfather managed one of the great working cattle ranches in the American Southwest for more than two decades, running a quarter-million acres of mesa and canyon in northeastern New Mexico. Her grandmother kept the headquarters and held everything together in the way that ranch women do. Davidson grew up in that country, on horseback and in dust, absorbing its rhythms, its people, and its particular combination of beauty and hardship.

She had a story, and it wouldn’t leave her alone.

Davidson wrote La Conquistadora from memory — the marble-top sideboard, the silver bell, the thick vine on the portal, the three-point crown brand. She did not have to look up what the sky looks like before a storm, or the sound a lariat makes when it catches, or the smell of a branding pen on a hot afternoon. She knew it the way you know the rooms of a house you grew up in. By feel, in the dark.

But life intervened. Davidson earned degrees from the University of New Mexico and Texas Woman’s University, completed a Juris Doctorate at South Texas College of Law, and practiced law for two decades. The manuscript traveled with her — from drawer to drawer, cabinet to closet, across moves and years and the accumulation of a life fully lived. And then Multiple Sclerosis intervened in a way that made finishing the novel on her own no longer possible.

The manuscript sat. For years, it sat.

Chris Greer, Davidson’s caregiver of thirteen years, found the manuscript, read it, and understood what it was trying to be. He did the considerable work of helping it become that thing — editing with care and never once letting Davidson settle for less than the book deserved. Greer is the founder of Chris Greer Press, LLC, an independent publishing house with a catalog of nonfiction business titles, which took on La Conquistadora as its first fiction release.

The result is a novel that spans two summers separated by twenty-three years on a vast New Mexico cattle ranch. In 1946, Sophie Degarrin is nineteen, riding the summer wagon with the crew. Adam Connor is a cowboy back from the war with nothing but a saddle and a war record. What grows between them over six weeks on the open range cannot be hidden — and when the monsoon comes, it breaks more than the drought. Twenty-three years later, Sophie’s son arrives at the ranch for a summer of his own, and the secret his mother has carried since 1946 is everywhere around him.

“I should have read a book about how to write a book before I wrote a book,” Davidson says. “But I had a story, and it wouldn’t leave me alone, and eventually the only thing left to do was tell it.”

She is seventy-one years old. This is her first novel. It was more than thirty years in the making. It was worth the wait.

La Conquistadora is available now in trade paperback on Amazon and as a digital eBook at laconquistadoranovel.com. A hardcover edition is forthcoming.