Franktown

Jake didn't come to Franktown looking for trouble. Twenty-five years in the Marine Corps - the last stretch inside MARSOC, the kind of work that doesn't show up on paper - taught him how to disappear into a quiet life. A run-down house on the edge of a small Colorado town seemed like exactly that.

Then a stranger in a windbreaker hands him a lien notice for $54,000, due immediately, his half-renovated house on the line. Across town, diner owner Sherie Smith gets the same notice - for a business she inherited from an aunt she barely knew was leaving it to her. The two properties shouldn't have anything to do with each other. The lien says otherwise.

What starts as a paperwork mystery turns into something far more deliberate: a break-in that takes nothing but documents, a dumpster fire meant as a warning, an inspection rigged to fail. Someone built this trap decades ago and has been waiting, patiently, for it to spring. As Jake, Sherie, and an old friend with a knack for tracing money start pulling the thread, they uncover gold rights nobody knew were still owned, a corner lot worth more than anyone let on, and a name at the center of it all who never expected to be found.

Franktown doesn't give up its secrets easily. But it doesn't abandon its own, either.