Angol
THE DRY YEAR
Book Five of The Stone County Drifter
by Mark Collins
This time, there's no villain to defeat. Just a river running dry, and a stranger who might become a neighbor.
Five years after riding into Redemption Flats, Cole Danner has everything he once thought impossible - a thriving saloon, a growing family, and a town that has weathered fraud, violence, and its own hardest truths together. But when the worst drought in living memory hits Stone County, the threat isn't a corrupt baron or an outlaw gang. It's simple, devastating scarcity - and an upstream water company whose claims are, infuriatingly, entirely legal.
As ranches wither and tempers fray, Cole, Sheriff Tom Reyes, and lawyer Billy Nakai must find a path through a crisis that can't be won by exposing a lie or winning a gunfight - only through patient diplomacy with a rival settlement whose own needs are just as real and just as desperate as their own. When a wildfire threatens both communities at once, Redemption Flats and its upstream neighbor face a choice: keep fighting each other over a shrinking resource, or discover that they were never truly enemies at all.
THE DRY YEAR is a warm, character-driven capstone to The Stone County Drifter series - a story about fairness over victory, neighbors over rivals, and the hard-won wisdom that some of the toughest fights are won not by defeating an enemy, but by finding common ground.
Perfect for readers who love:
Frontier communities finding strength through cooperation
Character-driven Westerns with heart over gunplay
Water rights, drought, and the American frontier
Series finales with earned, emotionally satisfying endings
Book Five of The Stone County Drifter series. Books One through Four - REDEMPTION FLATS, THE IRON LINE, THE ABILENE RECKONING, and THE BLACKWATER LINE - are available now.
