True Bill

Some truths are worth dying for. Others are worth living with.

North Texas, 1891. Nineteen-year-old Hattie Bledsoe has spent eight years believing she knows why her father died. Now a law clerk in Denton, she trusts what can be written, witnessed, and proved.

She did not expect her mother's name to appear on a murder charge.

When an escaped convict is found dead in a dry creek bed, the evidence points to Ruth Bledsoe. Her footprints mark the scene. Fifty dollars from the sale of her two best cows has returned to her house. And she has lied about where she spent the night.

The man pursuing the convict is Texas Ranger Sergeant John Brice-the officer Hattie blames for failing to prevent her father's death eight years earlier.

Deputy Wade Shaw can read the ground better than most men read a newspaper. What he discovers could condemn Ruth or save her. He refuses to change a single fact, even for the young woman he is falling in love with.

As drought empties wells and drives families from their land, Hattie searches for the truth behind a missing page from her father's tally book. The deeper she digs, the more she discovers that the people she loves have been keeping secrets for years.

Her mother faces a murder trial. The family farm may be lost. And the truth could destroy the memory of the father she has spent her life defending.

To save her mother, Hattie must decide whether every truth deserves to be told-and whether justice can exist without mercy.

True Bill is a Western novel of buried secrets, frontier justice, family loyalty, and a love built on the courage to face the truth. The sixth book in the Texas Frontier Novels, it returns to the Mercy Creek country of The Land Between Us, Dead Man's Deed, The Last Free Grass, Running Iron, and Deed of Trust.