Last Will

Some promises outlive the ones who make them. Others demand more than anyone expects to give.

North Texas, 1895. After four years of drought, rain finally returns to Mercy Creek. Nineteen-year-old Lottie Bledsoe has spent her life asking questions, remembering answers, and speaking truths others would rather leave alone. She never expected an old cattleman's final request to carry her hundreds of miles from home.

Or to change everything she thought she knew about love.

Jubal Stroud is dying. Once one of the most powerful cattlemen in North Texas, he has spent eight years separated from his son Hardy, imprisoned for murder. Before he dies, Jubal wants one thing no amount of money can purchase: to see his son's face again.

He turns to two young people he trusts.

Bud Haskell, twenty-one, has spent years learning photography while carrying the memory of a father who never returned from Fort Worth. Now, with a camera of his own and an opportunity waiting in New York, he is preparing to leave the country where he grew up.

Lottie has plans of her own. A respectable young man offers her a steady future, and she has every reason to accept. But when Jubal asks her to carry his words to Hardy exactly as spoken, she cannot refuse.

Accompanied by retired Texas Ranger John Brice and Ben Tolliver, Bud and Lottie travel south on the Santa Fe Railroad toward a convict-lease camp in the Brazos bottoms.

What begins as a journey to photograph one prisoner becomes something far more dangerous.

Behind the camp's fences, men labor in chains, old injustices remain unburied, and Ben must confront a past he has spent years trying to escape. As rising water threatens the river bottom, one man faces a choice that may finally settle a debt carried since 1883.

And somewhere between the railroad, the Gulf Coast, and the road home, Bud and Lottie must decide whether the futures they planned are the futures they truly want.

Back at Mercy Creek, Jubal's final will holds a promise that could change the land and the lives of those who remain. But some things cannot be returned, some wrongs cannot be undone, and some people will never make the journey home.

Last Will is a Western novel of family, sacrifice, forbidden hopes, second chances, and the enduring power of promises kept. The seventh and final book in the Texas Frontier Novels, it brings the Mercy Creek saga to its conclusion, returning to the people and places of The Land Between Us, Dead Man's Deed, The Last Free Grass, Running Iron, Deed of Trust, and True Bill.