A marshal without a badge is only a woman with a horse and an opinion. Elara Vance has been that for five years. Now she has a cell in Blackwood, a rope waiting at dawn, and an offer from the man who put her there. Baron Cornelius Vane owns half the Montana territory and all of its machinery: the judge, the sheriff, the newspaper, the gallows already standing in the square. He took Elara's badge because she would not take his money. The offer is simple. Ride forty-five miles across the badlands, deliver the outlaw Silas Thorne to the town of Iron Creek, and collect the debt owed to her murdered husband's estate. Do that, and she walks. The debt is a ledger. Every bribe Vane paid, every deed he forged, every man he had killed is written in it, and Arthur Vance's name is on one of the pages. Vane is glad to let her come for it. A book full of names is no threat to a man who owns the court she would have to read it in. What he has not reckoned with is what she wants. Not revenge. A trial. Every mile of the road takes another piece of the standing she would need to hold one, and by the time she reaches Iron Creek she is riding with a wounded surgeon, a gunman with a ruined voice, and one rule she has never broken: she will not hang a man without proof, even if it costs her life. A whole town intends to watch her break it. This is a western about paperwork, and about the men who understood that whoever owned the county clerk owned the county. The riding is hard, the violence is fast and leaves marks, and nobody heals overnight. Second in the Chuckwagon series. When it ends, you will know what a fair trial is worth to a woman who has nothing else left to spend.
