Cover reveal! Prepare for a twisty, darkly seductive anti-hero origin story, starring a teenage killer whose trial in the Wild West is upended when her first victim, her husband, arrives alive with a story to tell. Lady or the Tiger by Heather M. Herrman is coming to shelves June 10, 2025!

When nineteen-year-old Belle King turns herself in for murder, the last thing she expects to see is her abusive husband standing outside her Dodge City jail cell, impossibly alive. He was the first man she ever meant to kill, but certainly not the last. She’s since woven a bloody tapestry across the Midwest—tearing the hearts out of men who couldn’t imagine her as more than a lamb.

With her husband’s unexpected arrival to her trial, Belle will be forced to resort to all the tricks in her arsenal to prevent him from ever being in control of her again. But as a girl in the 1880s, the last thing anyone will believe is a woman—even when she confesses to her own crimes.

Cutting through time and patriarchal ties, Lady or the Tiger is the story of how one mountain girl from Kentucky became the wickedest woman in the Wild West in an ode to girls with tigers in their hearts and blood on their teeth in pursuit of the greatest love story of all.

Scroll down to read a sneak peek, and remember to preorder your copy here.

Cover Illustration: Tomasz Majewski; Cover Design: Kristin Boyle

Not all little girls are born murderers, but every woman becomes one.

Most simply destroy pieces of themselves—their dreams, their desires, their right to speak to whom and what they please.

I kill men instead.

You see, I rather like my dreams, dark as they are. And my voice is my own. In fact, it has made me a fortune, slipping and sighing its way across the world’s greatest stages, then rising to steal unapologetically from the private opera boxes of the rich. I’ve ruined many a silk shirt with my glass-shattering operettas.

Many a man too.

As of this, my nineteenth year, I’ve killed a dozen men. More, if you count the time I helped my mother.

But right now, there is only one man on my mind. And if I’m not careful, he’ll catch me.

It is midnight, and I stand in the middle of a dirty street in Kansas, letting the ebb and flow of humanity swell against me. The air smells of cow shit and danger. Ladies of ill repute who have been flung here by careless fate, buffalo hunters who kill hundreds of beasts a day without a spark of remorse, and men with no names come to seek riches. Amongst them travel a very few of the land’s original people, nearly washed away now by this crushing wave of greed and guns.

For a moment, I think of running.

I could be in Boston by midweek. Paris in four. I have friends all over the world. Palaces to harbor in. Ancient manors with priceless wine cellars eager to fling their doors open to me. No one could stop me. I could run forever.

But then I see it. The single shadow of a bird, its daylight wings pressed against the moon, where it should not be.

He’s close.

And I know. There is only one place I will be safe.

As for all my performances, I have dressed for the occasion. Wrapped around me is a blanket of pure emerald silk, given to me by a king’s nephew in London. He paid an unspeakable sum for the treasure, hoping I would lay myself upon it like a fine treat waiting to be consumed.

Instead, I’ll spoil it here.

When I was a little girl, I wore a single dress for three years, my mother letting out the hem with each inch I grew until the dirty yellow calico finally fell away from me like a skin I was shedding.

Now I have money enough to buy a dressmaker’s factory. A dead empress’s trousseau if I so choose.

Not that it matters anymore. The dead don’t need dresses.

Overhead, the night is the kind of black that is almost clear, as if someone painted it on the back of a crystal plate. Tiny holes of brilliant light poke through, scattering the sky with stars.

A perfect necklace. Tilting my head back so that they lace my throat, I open my mouth and scream.

Here, on the prairie, there is nothing to stop it, no trees or hills or rivers to dampen the sound. Only a tiny spill of buildings, laughably small against the endless flat land, cobbled together like children’s toys with pasteboard and bricks.

My voice, trained for crowds of thousands, rises easily into the night, filling it, but no one seems to notice.

Screams, in this town, are apparently as common as spurred boots and tobacco spit.

A cowboy brushes against me, stumbling drunk and following the guiding red light of a trainman who uses his lantern’s glow to lead new arrivals to the town’s brothels. Because of this, they’ve started to call this collection of watering holes and entertainment the red-light district. The sound of a shot is followed by the crescendo of a player piano’s canned notes as a saloon door swings open and two gamblers tumble into the street, fists swinging.

It is, overall, a rather rude audience.

The people here are a mix of outlaws and citizens trying to maintain their morals in Gomorrah. Dodge City, the Wickedest Town in America, according to the papers.

But I’m the wickedest of them all.

And I don’t like to be ignored.

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