Saltwater Range War
A Depression-Era Maritime Western

About this book:

The dust of the San Joaquin Valley doesn't wash off easy—not from a man's boots, and not from his soul. In 1932, with the bank foreclosing on his farm and the whole country bleeding dry, Silas Thorne rides west to Monterey Bay, trading his saddle for a bunk aboard the *Sea Star*, a leaking purse seiner captained by a grizzled veteran of the sardine wars. But the Pacific isn't the escape Silas hoped for. Out here, the range war never ended; it just got wet. The grass is silver fish, the fences are invisible quota lines, and the rustlers drive diesel seiners painted white and green.

Nora Reed stands at the helm of the *Iron Crown*, inheriting her father's fleet and his enemies. She's fighting the canneries, the union, and a collapsing market to keep her crews fed, and she'll cut whatever lines she must to survive. When she steals Silas's captain's bait stock in the fog, she marks the *Sea Star* as the next obstacle to clear. But Silas didn't spend a lifetime reading the land just to be fooled by water. He knows a cut rope when he sees one, and he knows a woman running from a dry well when he meets her eye across fifty yards of rolling swell.

From the reek of Cannery Row to the knife's-edge tension of a midnight net check, *Saltwater Range War* plunges you into a Depression-era maritime western where the horizon offers no mercy. As permits shrink and prices collapse, the bay becomes a shootout on water—no sheriff, no law, just cold currents and hard men and one stubborn woman deciding what they're willing to sink for. The rules are exactly the same as the Valley: catch what you can, hold what you catch, and pray the fog hides you long enough to haul the last net.