Goldfield, Nevada, where there's a bonanza for those who are wily enough to get it.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, incredible gold ore was located in the Nevada desert, and the rush was on. There was Big Sam Jones, a horse trader out to fleece suckers; Maude Arbuckle, a determined prospector, with a shiftless husband to watch out for; Hannibal Dash, a geologist who abandons his academic life and family for adventure; and Delia Favor, another kind of gold digger, who knows how to mine men. The mines yielded an incredible fortune, but not for those who discovered the gold and developed the mines.

This is the second of Mr. Wheeler's celebrated novels about western mining towns and those who flooded in, and drifted out when the mines faded. It was followed by Sierra: A Novel of the California Gold Rush; Second Lives, set in Gilded Age Denver; Sun Mountain, a novel about the fabulous Comstock Lode in Nevada, and his 2011 release, The Richest Hill on Earth, about the copper kings of Butte, Montana.