When an unknown young African American woman is found murdered on the railroad tracks outside town, most of Burr, Oklahoma, would rather look the other way. The town’s police chief, troubled local hero and ex-Marine Emmett Hardy, doesn’t have that luxury. In his search for the killer, he’s forced to slice through layers of hate and hypocrisy to confront the ethical rot at the town’s core while being haunted by the vision of a life and love that might have been.

After a kidnap-for-hire plot results in the death of a young boy, Burr police chief Emmett Hardy blames himself and has an alcohol-fueled breakdown. His life at a crossroads, Hardy checks into the hospital for treatment, only to discover upon his release that he's been suspended from duty. When a dying prisoner contacts him about a long-forgotten unsolved case, Emmett—temporarily at loose ends—begins an informal investigation.

Gilman James comes home from Iraq - the last of three childhood friends to return. His brothers-in-arms are mere shadows of their former selves. Gil, unmarked, determines to take care of them. But how far should a man go for the people he loves? Stepping across the line between right and wrong, Gil finds himself stranded in the Texan desert as a bank heist he's planned goes horribly wrong. Pursued into the badlands by US Marshal John Whicher, a moment of violent reckoning is set in train. What makes an outlaw? Marshal John Whicher thinks he knows.

Harney County, Oregon, 1968: Nick Drake has a chest full of medals and enough demons to fill a duffel bag. He's been trained to kill but was never retrained to rejoin society. Drake flees to the lonesome high desert in search of redemption and takes a job patrolling wildlife refuges where the only conflicts are keeping out stray cows and ticketing poachers. But then he stumbles across a girl's body ritually placed in a gully. Her murder is only the beginning, and Drake must face humanity's heart of darkness once again if he's to stop a killer from turning even more gullies into graves.

This collection of mysteries from a fresh voice in Southwestern fiction stakes out the common ground between Tony Hillerman, Elmore Leonard, and Cormac McCarthy. Collection includes Nail’s Crossing, Greasy Bend, Butcher Pen Road, and Ten-Acre Rock.