Drawdown

di Clayton Redfield (Autore)

Glass House Editions, 2026

A dead man signed it nineteen days after his funeral. In the New Mexico bootheel, water is worth more than land, more than cattle, more than the people who live on it. Nora Bell knows that better than anyone. Her father's well feeds her horses, her house, and four other families at the end of a buried line. And now a company called High Mesa says it owns that water. They have the paperwork to prove it: an operating agreement with Walter Bell's signature and a notary's stamp. It's a clean deal on paper. There's just one problem. Walter Bell was already dead when it was notarized. So Nora climbs onto the pump-house roof with her father's rifle and dares them to come through the gate. Ray Varela is the man they send to talk her down. He's a former livestock investigator with a ruined name and one report he would give anything to take back. He needs the work. He needs the money. What he doesn't need is a conscience, and he's spent years getting along without one. But Ray is the only man in Cienega County who bothers to read the date. What starts as a dispute over a gate becomes something far more dangerous. The tankers keep rolling at night. The well goes dead without warning. Somebody keeps ledgers that don't add up and loads that don't come from where the tickets say. Inside High Mesa, the people at the top are deciding, one quiet compromise at a time, how much they're willing to bury to keep a contract alive. And the men who do their field work don't settle disputes with lawyers. The law is slow, the drought is not, and five households are drinking out of borrowed barrels and pickle buckets. Every day Nora waits for a judge is another day her neighbors go without water. Every question Ray asks puts him closer to the people who already shot him once. And the deadline is Monday. DRAWDOWN is a relentless contemporary western thriller about water, money, and the paper that decides who gets to keep either. It's the story of a rancher who refuses to sign, a broken man who refuses to look away, and a company that has decided that the truth is just another cost of doing business. The thirst on the highway isn't going anywhere. Neither is Nora Bell. If you like modern westerns with real grit, small-town corruption, and a slow-burning fuse that ends in a firestorm, you won't put this one down.

• Autore: Clayton Redfield
• Anno edizione: 2026
• Editore: Glass House Editions
• Formato: EPUB2 con DRMFREE
• Lingua: Inglese
• Compatibilità: Tutti i dispositivi (eccetto Kindle)
• Layout: Reflowable
• EAN: 9798237928853