What if a rancher’s daughter discovered that monsters were real?

Chloe Fortebat left her father’s ranch in Silberne with nothing but her horses, her knive, and a mysterious inheritance. She expected to find a new life in the Old World. What she found instead were werewolves, necromancers, and a sharp-dressed monster hunter who would change everything. This is the story of how a pragmatic frontier woman became the co-protagonist of the Hunter Healer King trilogy.

Who is Chloe Fortebat?

Chloe Fortebat is the co-protagonist of the Hunter Healer King trilogy and the primary POV character. Readers spend most of their time in her head, especially in Wolf’s Trail. She’s a rancher’s daughter from Silberne in the New World, who arrives in the Old World expecting opportunity and finds monsters instead.

The Gaucho Connection: Argentine Inspiration

Chloe might seem like a typical Wild West cowgirl at first glance: blunt, pragmatic, handy with a horse. But readers who pay attention will notice something different.

The wide-legged pants and short jackets she wears. The emphasis on having a string of matched riding horses. The preference for knives over “revolving guns.” These elements are based on Argentine gaucho culture rather than the cowboy culture of North America. Coming from this background makes Chloe unique in fantasy literature. She’s a woman shaped by a frontier culture, colliding with the Old World and its dark secrets.

Her late father Gil Fortebat was loosely inspired by the historical figure Juan Manuel de Rosas, a wealthy rancher who embraced the gaucho lifestyle but also became a controversial player in Argentine politics. In spite of some general similarities, Gil Fortebat is a softer, less driven man than his historical counterpart. De Rosas was an ambitious figure who made himself dictator of Argentina at one point. Gil simply backed the wrong political faction out of loyalties to his friends, rather than a desire for power.

Family Secrets and Political Exile

In any case, Chloe grew up believing her mother was dead. That’s not quite true, as she learns in the course of the trilogy. Her maternal grandfather died sometime back, and left his estate to Chloe. She never felt the need to learn more about it, until her father backed the losing side in one of Silberne’s many revolutions. Facing execution and the confiscation of his ranch, he sent Chloe and her horses out of the country, with his own prized mare and stallion as his final gift to Chloe. At this point, she decided she had better look into her grandfather’s estate.  

Meeting Maxim os Storm

The inheritance brings her face to face with werewolves, and Dr. Maxim os Storm, the man who hunts them. Maxim is the other protagonist and POV character in the trilogy, and all three books end with Maxim POV scenes. 

In some ways, he’s a familiar type of man to Chloe. Confronted with an injured ally, he patches them up. Confronted with a threat to his own life or someone else’s, he kills it. But she comes from a fairly macho culture, and it’s important for the men of Silberne to maintain ”face” and status in front of other men. Maxim only cares what other men think about him when their opinion of him interferes with what he needs to do. He’s polite because he thinks it’s the right thing to do, not because he thinks someone will challenge him to a knife fight if he’s rude to them.  

It’s these differences that throws Chloe off-balance. She decides early on that he’s more or less trustworthy. His relentless drive to protect others makes her feel protective towards him in turn. But at the same time, she’s slow to realize that she’s attracted to this man, whom she describes early on as “not quite handsome.”

(Yes, I know. Book covers lie in the name of successful advertising. Including my book covers. Sorry about that.) 

And he fails to communicate something important about himself to her until after their first kiss, which does not help his case in the least. But the details of that are in the trilogy, so I will let you discover them there! 

A Dynamic Duo

 What makes Chloe compelling is her fish-out-of-water perspective combined with unshakeable competence. She doesn’t know this world’s rules, but she’s not helpless. She adapts, she learns, and she holds her own against monsters that terrify people who’ve lived with them all their lives. Her deepening partnership with Maxim works precisely because they’re so different. She’s direct where he’s reserved. She’s warm where he’s controlled. And yet they share the same core: when someone needs protection, they act. When something threatens those they care about, they fight.

Want to meet Chloe? Start with Wolf’s Trail, where a rancher’s daughter discovers that the Old World has monsters…and finds the man who’ll help her fight them.

Read the Hunter Healer King Trilogy today!