About
Nicki's debut novel, Ellis River, won the Independent Book Publishers Association's Bill Fisher Award for Best First Book - Fiction. The next year it won IBPA's award for Best Audiobook - Fiction. The novel was also a finalist for the Eric Hoffer First Horizons Award, received an Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize, and was a semi-finalist for the Publishers Weekly Booklife Prize. The sequel, Zephyr Trails, launched in June, 2024. Nicki has won additional awards for her poetry and creative writing, including the Writer’s Digest Annual Poetry Awards and the Ray Fabrizio Memorial Award. Nicki holds a Certificate in Creative Writing from Monterey Peninsula College. She is a member of the Independent Book Publishers Association, the Alliance for Independent Authors, and the Central Coast branch of the California Writers Club. She currently lives on California’s inspiring central coast where she is at work on the final book of the Ellis River trilogy.
You can find Nicki at: NickiEhrlich.com, Instagram, and Goodreads.
Featured Work
Zephyr Trails
In this sequel to award-winning Ellis River, the fine line between friends and enemies blurs as Ellis Cady sets out to reach the new frontier of post-Civil War America.
After waiting out winter at the Cady ranch in southern Missouri, hope blooms in the Spring of 1866. Ellis receives news of a mysterious man arriving in St. Louis. Will she find her father alive and well, or finally put his memory to rest?
Grasping at the illusive promise of her father’s whereabouts, Ellis is distracted by the intrepid trick rider, Jimmie, a woman who rides with Levi Jack’s Wild West Exhibition. Then, talk of reinstating a messenger service akin to the Pony Express rekindles a faded dream. Since the war’s devastation, important letters and messages still need to get through a Western landscape governed by Indians and outlaws. When an untimely epidemic threatens, Ellis finds herself back in the saddle, a young woman and her horse on a perilous trail.
Other Works
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Ellis River
2022
