Epic Western Novel The Blackwater Prize, Book 1, (Paperback)

<i>Some men chase silver. Silas Rook chases the road that touches everything.</i><br>When a bloodied prospector dies in a Blackwater saloon with an oilskin packet hidden against his ribs, drifter Cole Mercer and former saloon singer Lena Vale are pushed onto a chase neither of them wanted. Cole rides because the dead man saved his life with one whispered phrase: *wrong mouth*. Lena rides because she knows what Silas Rook is - and what he does to women who refuse the bargains he offers in clean parlors.<br>Across late-summer canyon country, Rook's men come in waves. Vance the patient hunter. Bledsoe the fire-setter who hums while he works. Orin who closes too fast. And Pike, who was Cole's kin before he was anyone's gun. The country itself becomes the larger antagonist: dry wash, burned refuge, hidden cairn route, smoke that bends the wrong way. The horses pay for every mile. The kin debt accrues by ridges and rawhide knots.<br>What Rook actually wants is not the silver at the end of the trail. It is the hidden mouth of a road that would let a man control who can move through the country at all. Cole and Lena learn this on stone the same hour the climb-out turns to fire on the ledge - and the choice they make at the Last Ledge will close some doors, leave others open for the country to answer, and send them west on a horse Cole did not name and never will.<br><i>The Blackwater Prize</i> opens the <b>Epic Western Novel Series</b> - six books of classic American western in the prestige register. Real horses. Real country. Restrained romance. A moral spine. A frontier that never pretends to be anything but what it is.<br>For readers of Charles Portis (*True Grit*), Paulette Jiles (*News of the World*), and the literary corner of the western shelf.<br>

• Epic Western Novel The Blackwater Prize, Book 1, (Paperback)
• Author: Anson Dray
• ISBN: 9781972112755
• Format: Paperback
• Publication Date: 2026-07-01
• Page Count: 626