The Draw

The prize is a dead man's gun.

Luther Drake's Colt — custom-built for one hand only, odd-balanced, heavy on the trigger, impossible for anyone else to shoot clean. The man who could have used it has been in the ground for twenty years. When a young ranch hand named Audie McKay picks it up at a shooting contest, the crowd goes quiet. Then the shots start landing where they're supposed to, and they don't stop.

The territory has been watching for someone like this. Audie doesn't want the attention. What he wants is the answer to a question the man who raised him just handed him: who are you, really?

The answer is out there somewhere in the western territory — a place held down by three powerful men. The sheriff who owns the law. The outlaw who owns the roads. The rancher who owns everything south of the bluffs. They've kept this territory fractured for decades because fractured is easier to control. The homesteads go empty. The towns go quiet. The people who live here pay tribute and keep their eyes on the ground.

Audie grew up in that silence. He knows what it costs.

What follows is not a rampage. It's something harder — the building of an unlikely alliance from the inside out, going up against each of the three men who hold the territory. Some can be persuaded. Some can only be beaten. And some fights leave more behind than they take.

The Draw is the first book of the Dead Man's Country Trilogy. Gritty and spare, in the tradition of the great American West.