Judas Star

He followed a light in the dark. He found a debt that only a bullet could pay.

Drifting across the empty expanse of West Texas, former U.S. Marshal Eldridge Sample is looking for nothing more than a quiet trail. But when a brilliant, unblinking star hangs low over the horizon, curiosity pulls him off the path.

It doesn't lead to a manger. It leads to a mud-chinked shack, a woman in labor holding a shotgun, and a husband who vanished on his way to pay the mortgage.

Riding into the mud-slicked town of Cross Creek to find the missing man, Sample uncovers a racket that is as efficient as it is cruel. In a town where the Banker spots the marks and the Sheriff takes a cut of the robbery, an honest man doesn't stand a chance.

But the corrupt law of Cross Creek has never met a man like Eldridge Sample.

With time running out and a life waiting to be born in the dark, Sample must dismantle the town's machinery of greed the only way he knows how: by dragging the guilty into the light and balancing the books with a Colt .45.

"The bank is closed," Sample said. "But the reckoning is open."

A tight, atmospheric noir-western novella that packs the punch of a heavy caliber round. The Star of Judas is a story of hard men, desperate hours, and the violent cost of redemption. Perfect for fans of Elmore Leonard's Valdez Is Coming and the gritty realism of True Grit.