The Round Valley Kid

Cole McCoy is nineteen years old and invincible. He has a new truck, a spot on the Challenger tour, and a dream that feels closer every day.

Then Sinister shatters his hip.

Seven seconds into what should have been his breakthrough ride, his hand catches in the rope. The bull drags him across the arena. And when the hoof comes down, everything Cole has worked for disappears in the Jacksonville dust.

Back home in Springerville, Arizona, Cole faces the long dark. The pills that make the pain go away. The father who never knew how to say the right thing. The mother who left when he was nine and never came back. The fear that maybe this is how his story ends: twenty years old, broken, wondering what might have been.

But Cole is not alone.

Chance Peters is his best friend, a rider whose own career ended at eighteen when a bull named Copperhead broke his back. He cannot ride anymore, but he can help Cole learn to ride again. Every Tuesday, he drives up the dirt road to stand beside Cole at the rusty practice chutes, patient and persistent, refusing to let his friend give up.

When Cole catches the attention of Brady Cusler, a legendary stock contractor with his own reasons for saving broken riders, and Travis Shelfler, the three-time world champion who sees something worth investing in, the comeback begins for real.

But there is only one way to know if Cole has truly healed.

He has to face Sinister again.

The Round Valley Kid is a novel about what breaks us, what rebuilds us, and the stubborn refusal to let the world tell us what we cannot do. It is about fathers and sons, about friendship and sacrifice, about the eight seconds that can change everything.

For readers who loved Friday Night Lights, The Art of Fielding, and All the Pretty Horses. For anyone who has ever been knocked down and had to decide whether to get back up.

Real stories from real dirt.