Forty Feet West

A widow's eastern boundary line has moved forty feet west. The corrected survey is properly filed, the filing agent licensed, the paperwork in order. Nora Vane's irrigation ditch - the one that waters her south field - now belongs to >Ward Colton arrives in Creel, New Mexico Territory, with a folder, a field compass, and the kind of patience that makes dishonest men uncomfortable. He is not looking for violence. He is looking for the first place the record stopped >What he finds in the Holt County filing index is not one fraudulent survey. It is a pattern - small, unhurried, nearly invisible to anyone who doesn't know what ink was commercially available in the territory in the fall of 1881. The Creston Land Cooperative has been acquiring water access across the Meridian Fork corridor one corrected boundary at a time, and the people who filed the >Forty Feet West is a quiet thriller set in the world of territorial land records - where the real weapon is a notary seal and the most dangerous man in the county is the one with a licensed surveyor on retainer.

Pagina's: 186, Paperback, Independently published