Dark Copper

Every grave on the Brazos says cholera. The dead mans breath says murder.

Texas, 1873. The banks have failed back East, the rivers are low, and cholera is filling fresh graves faster than anyone can ask questions.

Deputy U.S. Marshal Jonah Teague rides into Hollisters Ferry to close a beef-fraud case against a dead government contractor. He finds garlic on the corpses breath, white bands across its fingernails, and a widow who remembers a polite German embalmer who asked to sit with the body alone. Before the night is out, Teague has his Colt under a hired mans jaw and his proof in a strip of copper gone dark in a kitchen flask.

The woman who ran that test is Dr. Honora Vail, the countys only physician. She keeps arsenic on her shelves and a page cut from her ledger, and her husband lies in the churchyard after a fever the town still whispers about.

Then the telegrams come back. Wichita. Kansas City. A trail boss buried under creek stones in the Chickasaw Nation. The same symptoms. The same German. Every dead man rode in the same 1867 cattle drive. So did Teague, and what that outfit did one August night in Kansas is something he has never told a living soul.

Now he is riding north across quicksand rivers and into the first blue norther of winter, through a sovereign nation that charges a Texas lawman toll and answers none of his questions, beside a woman who is lying to him about the same dead men he is lying to her about.

Somewhere ahead, a patient man is working down a list of names.

Teagues is on it.

Dark Copper is Book One of The Embalmers Trail, a nine-book frontier mystery saga for readers of Elmer Kelton, Larry McMurtry and Paulette Jiles. Saddle up. The list is getting shorter.