BLOOD ON THE RAILS

Cole Ransom has one talent worth mentioning: he can read a man's fear before the man admits it to himself. It's gotten him out of every hole he's ever gambled his way into. It won't get him out of this one.

Three days from a debt he can't pay, Cole watches his ledger get sold out from under him to the Governor's office itself, and finds himself pressed into carrying a sealed report across territory nobody in their right mind rides through anymore. He's not alone for long. A rancher's daughter with more grit than money. A cardsharp who reads people better than Cole does and likes him even less for it. A widow who's buried two husbands and isn't afraid of much that's still living.

None of them are ready for what's still living out there.

A derailed train. A pack of something faster than fear. A town built on ground that something else has already claimed. And underneath it all, an ancient, armored thing the ridge has kept sealed and starving for longer than any man's memory reaches, waking up at exactly the wrong time to remember it's still hungry.

Blood on the Rails is the second novel in the Talon Country series, a Dino-Western frontier where the land itself keeps older, hungrier secrets than any prospector's map ever accounted for.