*Selected for Kirkus best Indie books of 2022!

In the summer of 1975, a group of young men known as “the boys” make their stab for freedom harvesting wild hemp, or marijuana, on the Kansas plains. Several are Vietnam vets, and all are somehow marked, at odds with their time. They see themselves as inheritors of the mythic West, like buffalo...

Jack Marshal, known as “the Lion,” is a prideful sinner and reckless womanizer. When his 15-year-old daughter, Bonny, winds up pregnant by an old running buddy, Jack is outraged. And when the man is found dead, Jack is charged with murder.

Alongside the coming trial play the many goings-on in a small Kansas town, summer 1960. There’s Ruthie, Jack...

Part mystery and part myth born of fact and rumor left buried in the Kansas dirt. The story opens with a murder as desperate as the voice that stirs from the dust in witness. This voice, or knowing, haunts a young man, Faris Clayton, who will play in events to come. Time and place, 1934, Elim, Kansas.

The action involves six gamblers initially...