The Name You Keep (Paperback)

Emmett Lacey is eighteen years old, broke, and hungry for a name worth remembering.

When a cattle boss named Dutch brings him into the orbit of Thomas Blackwell - a man whose name alone can make grown men go pale - Emmett gets what he asked for. A place in an outfit. A Colt revolver he names Mercy. And a path that leads from riding drag on a stolen herd to standing in the road with a bandana over his face and a gun in his hand.

Set in the Arizona Territory in the early 1880s, The Name You Keep follows a young man's descent into the outlaw life of Cochise County - from the cattle trails south of the Dragoons to the saloons of Tombstone to a canyon ambush in the Chiricahuas that changes everything. As Emmett climbs deeper into Blackwell's machinery, he discovers that the name he's been building is also a cage - constructed from the things he's done to earn it, held together by the things he can never undo.

A novel about ambition, violence, and the distance between who you are and who the territory makes you, The Name You Keep is a literary Western in the tradition of the great outlaw stories of the American frontier.

Nicholas Streeter dropped out at fifteen to chase a cowboy dream. He trained mustangs, rode bulls, and broke his body doing the work most people only watch on TV. He writes Western fiction and horse stories from the ground up, because he lived it. He lives with his wife and children and still dreams of that horse ranch in Apache County. Real stories from real dirt.