The Taking: A Heartland Crime Thriller (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798188560164)

He came home to hold the line. He didn't know the whole valley was already being stolen out from under it.

Sheriff Dell Rourke bought his way back into the county where he grew up - sold the house his late wife died in, took the pay cut, came home to the one place on earth where the roads still knew him. He expected speeding tickets and lost hunters. He got a murdered landowner, a valley being erased one deed at a time, and a faceless company that does this for a living.

It looks like a heart attack. It looks like a fair sale. It looks like a family that moved away. It looks like nothing at all - until you lay every legal piece in a row and see the machine underneath: forged deeds, a stolen notary stamp, poisoned wells, a bought county, and a corridor of stolen land aimed at billions of dollars nobody in Hollow Creek will ever see.

Rourke has no jurisdiction they'll honor, no evidence they can't bury, and no allies left but a young deputy and a wall of photographs. They strip his badge. They sit in his kitchen to prove they can. They offer him a pension and a porch - and when he won't take it, they run him off a county road and leave him bleeding.

He gets up anyway. Because a man doesn't have to win the whole war. He just has to hold his piece of the line.

THE TAKING is a lean, propulsive heartland thriller about the last honest man in a county that's been bought - and the one crack in a perfect crime. For readers who like their justice earned the hard way.