It is 1872. Bill Ogden is a Kansas homesteader given to opportunism and appetite. As ingratiatingly disingenuous as Tom Sawyer, if just a bit less keen, Ogden has married the handiest piece of wealth to finance his way out of Ohio. When the wife proves as demanding and pleasant as farm labour, Ogden hires a hand for the heavy lifting and takes his love to town. He opens a saloon in nearby Cottonwood (it is only the community's second, built on the site of its first), sleeping in the smithy's loft when female comfort is otherwise engaged, as it often is on a frontier with more available men than women.

Enter Marc Leval with grandiose plans for Cottonwood's development and a beautiful, flirtatious wife. Ogden's conundrum, and he readily accepts it, is that the Levals simultaneously recognize Bill's bursting ambitions. In short order Ogden is the lover of the wife of his best friend, a man who offers to make him wealthy, but whose own resources and promises are cast in equal shades of grey.

As in The Walkaway, Phillips uses a historically credited crime (in this case the doings of Kansas' Bloody Bender family) as catalyst for his characters' every-day venality. About the middle of the book, Ogden has cause to quit Cottonwood in the company of the comely Mrs. Leval.

View and review are another hallmark of Phillips' books. In Ice Harvest, Phillips' first novel, mob lawyer Charlie Arglist takes two farewell circuits through the joints and dives of Witchita before skipping town. In The Walkaway, an aging and forgetful Gunther Fahnstiel revisits his story in the same city. Phillips gives Bill Ogden a few years to mature in San Francisco before returning him to the scene of his crimes in fictional Cottonwood. To say that things were not as they seemed the first go 'round is to unfairly abbreviate Phillips storytelling abilities.

Let's just say that though Leval's grandiose plans did not exactly pan out, Cottonwood nevertheless thrived on the brand of opportunistic optimism characteristic of the long-absent founder Bill Ogden. Cottonwood is a necessary reminder that municipal corruption in America is at least as old, and every bit as cracker-barrel funny, as the satire of Mark Twain.