Under a Copper Sky

Arizona Territory, 1887. Sheriff Gideon Hale stops a lynching and finds himself holding the wrong end of a copper baron's plan. The boy he saves is Rafael Cárdenas, and the stolen cattle he supposedly branded turn out to be wearing his own family's mark underneath a fresh one. Following that evidence brings Gideon to La Ciénega - the last dependable water for thirty miles - and to Alma Cárdenas Ibarra, a widowed healer holding her family's Spanish land grant together against crooked surveys, a bought judge, and a scripture-quoting gunman who never leaves a mark.Then the earth moves. The Sonoran earthquake of May 3, 1887 kills the spring that has fed La Ciénega for sixty-six years and opens a new one two miles east, on ground the maps say belongs to someone else. What Alma's father has hidden for forty years could win the case outright - or get all of them killed. And the only lawman willing to carry the proof a hundred miles is the one man Alma can afford neither to love nor to lose.