The Dark Trace

From the editors

A Texas Ranger, a body in a silo and a mark from his own past

Harry Matheson has farmed West Texas for forty-three years when he finds a man hanging in his silo. A symbol is carved into the chest. Ranger Caleb Strickland knows the mark. Caleb's dying comrade, Crow, once scratched it in the dirt and whispered one name: Marlow. The case drags Caleb back toward a covert operation fifteen years gone.

The opening is vivid, with rust running down the silo in arterial patterns. Matheson knows every inch of his land, but he does not know death. The investigation moves briskly from Midland to El Paso and Albuquerque.

Suited to anyone who likes Texas crime with a military conspiracy underneath.

Perfect for: Military-conspiracy thrillers · Texas Ranger procedurals

What’s inside

1. Prologue
2. Back in the Saddle
3. The Symbol
4. The Farmer’s Story
5. Lydia’s Letter
6. The Silo Autopsy
7. Ortiz’s Concern
8. The First Trace
9. The Missing Contractor
10. The Woman in El Paso
11. Caleb’s Realization
12. The Message
13. The Third Body
14. Rourke Returns
15. The Pattern
16. The Operation
17. Marlow’s Philosophy
18. The Survivor
19. The Survivor’s Story
20. The Fourth Body
21. Caleb’s Breaking Point
22. The Desert Chase
23. The Abandoned Base
24. The Truth About Crow
25. The Fifth Body
26. The Files
27. Lydia in Danger
28. The Motel Confrontation
29. The Escape
30. The Files Revealed
31. The Revelation
32. The Ranch
33. Caleb’s Choice
34. The Debate
35. The Fight
36. Ortiz Saved
37. The Desert Pursuit
38. The Final Confrontation
39. The End of Marlow
40. The Dark Trace Continues
41. Epilogue

Read the opening

The Man in the Silo The silo rose from the flat West Texas landscape like a monument to something forgotten. Rust spiraled down its corrugated walls in arterial patterns, and the air around it shimmered in the hundred-degree heat, distorting the horizon until the world looked broken. Harry Matheson had worked this land for forty-three years. He knew every inch of it the way a man knows his own body—the dry riverbeds, the places where the soil held water longest, the spot near the north fence where the coyotes came through at dusk. He had buried a wife here. He had born three children in the house across from the east pasture. He had watched his brother’s funeral procession wind through these roads on an August morning just like this one, the dust rising behind the hearse in great amber clouds. But he did not know death like this. He found it inside the silo at 3:47 on a Tuesday afternoon. The interior of the silo was a cathedral of rust and shadow. Sunlight streamed through the gaps in the corrugated metal, illuminating dust motes that hung in the stale air like suspended thoughts. The smell hit him first—not the sharp reek of fresh death, but something older and more insidious, the smell of decomposition that had begun its patient work three or four days ago. The body hung from the loading beam, suspended by rope looped beneath the arms. The head was tilted back, the mouth open as if in a final, silent scream. The skin had begun to darken, that peculiar purple-black that came as the blood settled and the flesh began its transformation. Flies scattered as Matheson’s footsteps…

The sample pages on this site continue the opening — and the full book is available in print.