BLURB
Cooper Dundee is in trouble. His stagecoach line is
about to go under—and he stands to lose everything. The long-standing rivalry between Coop and
his older half-brother, Jonathan, has been simmering since childhood. Now that
Jonathan has lost his share of the business on the turn of a card, his
resentment is at a boiling point.
But Jonathan isn’t the only one who wants to see
Cooper go down. An old nemesis from the past insinuates himself into Cooper’s
life—and into his business—with deadly plans of his own.
When Coop is nearly killed in a suspicious stagecoach
accident, he realizes he’s been set up. The lynch mob is just outside the
door—if he survives his terrible injuries.
With his pregnant wife, Regan, and her young son, Michael, in his life, Cooper’s
got too much to live for to give up now. But how can he beat the odds stacked
against him? In a desperate bid to save everything dear to him, he faces a
deadly showdown with a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving. Either way, it
will all end at the place he was born—Casa Grande…
EXCERPT
It was those long, grueling hours of
hard labor that had melted the flesh from him. At first, his soft hands had bled,
and the white flesh on his back had burned and blistered. And then, as the days
stretched into weeks and the weeks into months, his entire body hardened. After
the first year, he could stare at his own reflection and wonder about the face that
stared back.
He had changed so much, including adding
a beard, that even Cooper Dundee did not recognize him. He laughed. Only moments
before, he had shared a drink with the man whose testimony had sent him to prison—and
shared a drink with the man’s attorney, Estevan Foley—and neither one had known
him!
Finished with his chores, he stood
up, smearing yet another glob of thick grease on the large wheel hub. It was an
effective cover for a lug nut he had loosened. It was going to work, he thought
smugly. This time, after all the waiting, all the careful planning, it was going
to work.
And before the day was over, Cooper
Dundee would be dead.
