The Accused

**HE COULD NOT SHOOT HIS WAY OUT OF THIS ONE.**

A stranger lies dead in a wash at the edge of the Blossom Ranch with a single bullet through his heart. Ten feet away, half-hidden in the bluestem grass, sits an old Winchester rifle with the initials T. M. carved into the stock.

The rifle belongs to Tap Miller.

For four years Tap has built a quiet life in the Texas Panhandle. A wife. A son. A small house at the south end of his brother-in-law's spread. The war and the killings behind him. The cell door slamming shut in Mobeetie ends all of that in a single afternoon. The evidence is on the ground. The town has been fed a year of poisoned talk by a cattle baron in Amarillo who has not forgotten the trouble of last year, and half the county is already convinced that Tap Miller is exactly the kind of man the rope was made for.

This time he cannot ride. This time he cannot draw. This time he must sit on his own porch and trust his wife Helen, his half-broken brother-in-law Robert, and a half-drunk Tascosa lawyer named Eli Carver to find the truth before a jury finds him guilty.

The dead man came from Denver carrying a twenty-year-old picture of a girl in a dark dress. The picture leads to a parsonage. The parsonage leads to a name the Blossom family has not spoken aloud in twelve years. And somewhere in Mobeetie, behind a face Tap has never looked at twice, walks the man who fired the shot, and the wealthy enemy whose paper trail is wrapped around it like wire.

**The fifth Tap Miller novel. A murder mystery in the western frame, and the slow unraveling of a secret that runs deeper into Blossom Ranch than anyone left living dares to remember.**