Westword: Reinventing Baby Doe and Riding Scared With Murph: Two Spooky New Novels

Just in time for Halloween, two novels dealing with eerie Colorado themes are haunting local bookstores. One is a fictionalized channeling of one of the state's most celebrated and puzzling historical figures, while the other is a semi-comic mystery dealing with seances, Riverside Cemetery, cab driving and other scary topics. Donna Baier Stein's The Silver Baron's Wife (Serving House Books) is a fresh take on the much-recounted rags-to-riches-to-rags story of Lizzie "Baby Doe" Tabor, whose scandalous romance with silver tycoon Horace Tabor made her one of the wealthiest women in late-nineteenth-century America — until her dreams collapsed with the silver market, leaving her to live out her last days as an impoverished hermit in a one-room shack, hoping to revive her late husband's Matchless Mine.