The Junction at Ironwood Crossing
A Western

About this book:

The wind at Ironwood Crossing doesn't care about the calendar—it blows the same alkali grit across the rails in 1922 as it did in 1896, the night a gold shipment vanished and Agent Thomas Miller vanished with it. For twenty-six years, the railroad buried the truth along with the ledger pages, and Arthur Vance has kept his head down, running his depot with the precision of a timetable and the silence of a man who knows which questions get a man transferred—or buried. Then Silas Thorne steps off the platform, sixty-one years old with a bullet near his heart, a sister's deathbed promise in his pocket, and a brother-in-law's name on his lips.

What follows is a Western stripped of myth and built on ballast: two aging men circling a cold case across frozen switches and abandoned narrow-gauge grades, where every rusted spike and smoked telegram holds a clue the company paid to forget. Silas reads the ground like scripture; Arthur reads the rules like gospel. Between them lies a robbery that wasn't a robbery, an agent who wasn't a thief, and a conspiracy that reaches from the gorge's shadows all the way to Omaha's boardrooms.

Atmospheric, patient, and forged in the vocabulary of steam-era railroading, *The Junction at Ironwood Crossing* delivers a mystery where the past isn't dead—it's just waiting on a siding for the right engine to pull it into the light.