Max Fly, Private I, is about a former rodeo clown and roguish heretic discontent small town newspaper reporter moonlighting as a private investigator. After spending time following unfaithful husbands from motel to motel, he stumbles across a homicide case where a woman is found naked and decapitated in a polish flat, a typical four room dwelling, common on the south side of Milwaukee in the 40's and 50's. Max's friend, homicide detective Harry Marshall, said the victim had a body to kill for and apparently someone did.

Max Fly is at it again. He is hired by the wealthy family of his former rodeo rival, Mike Scanlon, to help solve the brutal murder of Mike and his son, Little Mike, as they rode together on their ranch. Along the way, Max gets a dose of Tombstone history as well as love from a Cochise County Deputy Sheriff, Deputy Debbie Red Eagle, a Yaqui Indian Good Spirit woman. Max and his friend Hap Schultz stir up trouble as they question suspects that reach to Hollywood and back and include the mob, local mining interests, as well as the lovely wife, Rachel Scanlon, who left Max in the Austin State Hospital with broken ribs as well as a broken heart close to twenty years ago.

The novel takes place in the Wyoming Territory, which is rich in history. Famous frontiersmen such as Jim Bridger, John Colter, Kit Carson, Jebediah Smith and General John Fremont spent time exploring the land and hunting for beaver pelts. Wyoming was also home to many plains Indians and it is in this backdrop that this novel takes place. It is about Swedish immigrants, a boy and his mother, who find themselves in the Wyoming Territory in the 1870's. The boy, Esben Hjerstedt, and mother live with the Lakota Sioux after his mother marries a Sioux Warrior named Grey Wolf. His mother and Grey Wolf are savagely murdered by six wasichus, Sioux for white men.The rest of the novel has Esben seeking revenge on the people responsible for killing his mother and Grey Wolf, his adoptive father.