The Dry Year

THE DRY YEAR

Book Five of The Stone County Drifter

by Mark Collins

This time, there's no villain to defeat. Just a river running dry, and a stranger who might become a neighbor.

Five years after riding into Redemption Flats, Cole Danner has everything he once thought impossible - a thriving saloon, a growing family, and a town that has weathered fraud, violence, and its own hardest truths together. But when the worst drought in living memory hits Stone County, the threat isn't a corrupt baron or an outlaw gang. It's simple, devastating scarcity - and an upstream water company whose claims are, infuriatingly, entirely legal.

As ranches wither and tempers fray, Cole, Sheriff Tom Reyes, and lawyer Billy Nakai must find a path through a crisis that can't be won by exposing a lie or winning a gunfight - only through patient diplomacy with a rival settlement whose own needs are just as real and just as desperate as their own. When a wildfire threatens both communities at once, Redemption Flats and its upstream neighbor face a choice: keep fighting each other over a shrinking resource, or discover that they were never truly enemies at all.

THE DRY YEAR is a warm, character-driven capstone to The Stone County Drifter series - a story about fairness over victory, neighbors over rivals, and the hard-won wisdom that some of the toughest fights are won not by defeating an enemy, but by finding common ground.

Perfect for readers who love:

• Frontier communities finding strength through cooperation

• Character-driven Westerns with heart over gunplay

• Water rights, drought, and the American frontier

• Series finales with earned, emotionally satisfying endings

Book Five of The Stone County Drifter series. Books One through Four - REDEMPTION FLATS, THE IRON LINE, THE ABILENE RECKONING, and THE BLACKWATER LINE - are available now.