The Long Scar

A line on a map. A dying man's signature. A town that has no idea what's coming for it.

Conn Maddox rides north off the Mogollon Rim wounded, wanting nothing more than a place to mend and a road to leave by when he's able. What he finds in the high pine country above the Rim is Harpe's Crossing - a small timber settlement with its hands tied by a survey line that wasn't there a year ago, drawn through homestead claims and spring pastures by a company with good lawyers and no patience left to wait.

Curtis Alderton has the paper. A dying man closing his last contract before his body finishes the job his doctor already warned him about.

Denton Rusk has the patience. The kind that makes refusal cost more than any homesteader can afford to pay.

And the only thing standing between Harpe's Crossing and losing everything it has is a stranger who rode in wanting to be left alone.

But the past doesn't stay behind a man forever. A face from the army years Conn never speaks of is riding toward him too - carrying a question four years old, and an answer Conn isn't sure he has the right to give.

THE LONG SCAR is the second novel in the Conn Maddox series - a spare, hard-country Western about a man who reads land and people better than anyone alive, and what it costs him every time he chooses to do right in a place that was never going to do it for him.

Some debts are paid in money. Some are paid in blood. And some a man carries the rest of his life, whether he ever sets them down or not.

If you like competent men who say little and mean all of it, country that fights back, and a code that costs exactly what it's worth - ride north with Conn Maddox.