In 1893, seventeen-year-old Henrietta "Etta" Belmont has her future planned. Accepted into college and determined to become a schoolteacher, she expects a respectable life in New York-until circumstances force her west into a world of cowboys, soldiers, train robbers and gunfighters. The American frontier proves more dangerous-and more seductive-than anything Etta imagined. A brutal chain of events destroys the life she once knew and brings her face-to-face with Harry Longbaugh, the notorious outlaw better known as the Sundance Kid. Harry should represent everything Etta fears. Instead, she discovers a complicated man whose courage and unexpected kindness draw her toward a life she once would have condemned. Leaving Henrietta Belmont behind, she takes the name Etta Place and rides into legend alongside Sundance and his closest friend, Butch Cassidy. Together they rob banks and trains, evade Pinkerton detectives and bounty hunters, and chase the dream of earning enough money to escape outlaw life forever.

Their journey carries them across the fading American West and eventually to South America, where history records the violent deaths of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But history doesn't always get the story right. Blending real figures of the Old West with a provocative fictional explanation for one of its greatest mysteries, John A. Russo's Where the Wild Wind Blows is a sweeping tale of forbidden love, survival, reinvention, gunfights, outlaw justice and the final days of the untamed frontier. The West was disappearing. Etta Place was only beginning to find herself.