The Hacienda at Santo Niño
A Novel of the Northern Frontier

About this book:

In the blistering heat of 1626 New Mexico, the Hacienda at Santo Niño stands as a fortress of adobe and iron against a land that devours the weak. Mayordomo Diego de Trujillo has spent his life counting bushels, mending acequias, and navigating the brittle peace between Spanish colonists and the Tiwa pueblos—all while living in the long shadow of a dead patriarch whose boots still wait by the hearth. But when a dust-caked rider delivers a royal demand for eight hundred head of sheep the hacienda cannot spare, the fragile order Diego maintains begins to fracture, forcing him to choose between the Crown's hunger and the survival of the people who depend on him.

With prose as spare and striking as the high desert itself, *The Hacienda at Santo Niño* immerses you in a world where water is worship, iron is salvation, and every decision carries the weight of generations. Here, the past is not dead—it rides beside you, whispering in the smoke of pinon fires and the rustle of corn husks. Diego must confront the ghosts of conquest, the calculus of loyalty, and the terrible price of keeping faith in a place where mercy is measured in inches of muddy water.

For readers who crave historical fiction that breathes with authenticity and moral complexity, this is a novel of endurance and consequence: a masterfully rendered portrait of life on Spain's northern frontier, where empires end in dust and men are forged by what they refuse to surrender.