The Last Crop at Mercy Farm
An 1890s Heist Novel

About this book:

The drought has turned Mercy Farm to dust, and the railroad owns the debt. When a foreclosure notice gives Caleb Mercy thirty days to produce two thousand dollars—a sum that doesn't exist in all of western Kansas—his father vanishes into the night, leaving behind an empty saddle, a stolen transit log, and the cold iron key to a Diebold safe. Thomas Mercy hasn't given up; he's gone to work, planning a heist on the Wells Fargo express that thunders past their dead fields twice a month.

Caleb tracks his father into the shadows beneath the trestle at Dead Man's Gorge, where three months of surveillance notes reveal a meticulous plan to hit the payroll gold. But the old man's gone off-script, and railroad detectives are already drinking rye in Bellevue's back rooms. With the sheriff circling and the tracks humming with the next express, Caleb faces the harvest no farmer expects: ride after his father into the blast radius of a botched robbery, or watch the only land he's ever known sold out from under his boots.

Set in a 1894 Kansas where the rails eat farms for breakfast, *The Last Crop at Mercy Farm* is a gritty, atmospheric heist western where the score isn't gold—it's survival. Father and son. Iron safes and dry wells. A plan built on desperation, and a clock that started ticking long before the foreclosure notice arrived.