About this book:

In the blistering heat of a 1920s Mojave summer, Judge Silas Vance holds court on a porch at Mile Marker 40—a fading speck of a town called Jericho Junction that the world is about to leave behind. When a young surveyor arrives with a state order dissolving his circuit and rerouting the new asphalt highway miles away, Vance refuses to surrender. The law, he insists, doesn't follow the road. The road must answer to the law.

But then a homesteader’s well is dynamited by a construction crew, her son injured by a careless blast, and Vance issues an injunction against a powerful contractor backed by the Governor’s office. Armed with a wooden gavel, a tin inkwell, and thirty years of stubborn precedent, one old judge dares to block the march of progress with nothing more than a piece of paper. *The Circuit Judge of Jericho Junction* is a sun-scorched, dust-choked drama of justice versus ambition, where the last session is called not in a courtroom but in the shadows of a ghost town—and the final verdict belongs to the desert itself.