A Name Stolen - Scott E Adams

Charlie Randall survives by knowing when to stay at the table and when to leave town.

He moves through the northern Pennsylvania timber towns following card games and pig's ears; illegal saloons hidden in sheds and back rooms where whiskey flows after dark and money changes hands quietly. In Galeton, he learns how company scrip circulates before wages are earned, and how quickly a stranger can be blamed when it turns up in the wrong place. In Austin, the gambling grows sharper, the drinking heavier, and the sense that his name is being spoken in rooms he has never entered begins to take hold. In Costello, the road finally slows, and Charlie learns how easily a borrowed name can become a permanent mark.

By the time the path carries him toward Blowville, Charlie understands that what follows him is not chance, but design. A system built on silence, missing accounts, and men who are convenient to use and easier to discard.

A Name Stolen is a historical novel set in the logging towns of late-nineteenth-century Potter County, Pennsylvania, where pig's ears flourished, gambling and drink blurred the line between survival and law, and a stranger's name could be made to carry another man's burden.