A stolen relic. A dead thief.

And the killer isn’t finished.

 

When a rifle carried by an Alamo defender vanishes from the Noble County Museum, it looks like a brazen theft of irreplaceable history. But when the prime suspect turns up dead, Deputy Adam Cash realizes he's not chasing a thief anymore. He's hunting a killer.

Cash is the kind of lawman who knows his town's grudges better than his own—a man who's spent his career reading Pinyon's silences and navigating its buried resentments. But nothing in his years on the job has prepared him for what this rifle has unleashed. Because this isn't just a museum piece. A weapon carried into the Battle of the Alamo by a man who died on those walls carries a power that goes beyond history. To the right collector, the kind who crosses lines without blinking, it’s priceless. Worth more than a life. And someone has already crossed that line.

As Cash digs deeper, he finds that the rifle has drawn out something dangerous in people he thought he knew—neighbors, locals, familiar faces now capable of things he wouldn't have believed. The killer is still out there. The rifle is still out there. And in a town where everyone has something to protect, the most dangerous thing Cash can do is keep asking questions.

Set against the spare, sun-bleached beauty of the Texas Hill Country—limestone bluffs, cedar breaks, and towns that forget nothing—Deadly Relic is a taut mystery about the most dangerous kind of treasure: one that demands blood.

Fans of C.J. Box's landscape-driven crime fiction and Craig Johnson's  Longmire series will feel immediately at home in the sun-scorched world of Pinyon.