One of mankind’s greatest secrets… has been hiding in plain sight for three thousand years.

Half a century ago, an aberration was spotted by one of our earliest satellites, and summarily dismissed as a hardware malfunction. But it was no aberration. And no malfunction. It was an accidental glimpse of something extraordinary, and very old.

Mocked for decades, the man who designed the satellite is now dead. With the system’s original data firmly in the hands of former NTSB investigator Joe Rickards and anthropologist Angela Reed.

But the data is only to be shared with one other person besides them: a seventy-five-year-old NASA engineer who was part of the original program.

Joe Rickards is convinced it will lead mankind into darkness.

Angela believes it may be the answer the modern world has been longing for.

And former NASA engineer Leonard Townsend hasn’t the slightest idea what he’s about to get involved in.

To make matters worse, through a strange bedside confession, a journalist thousands of miles away has just learned that someone else already knows about the satellite’s fifty-year-old discovery.

Because they’ve been secretly using it for years.

“A wonderfully transporting tale of love in the Old West” (People Magazine) and “a brilliant, beautiful page-turner” (Chris Bohjalian, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Double Blind) about a pregnant young mother, her child, and the frontier tradesman who helps them flee vengeful outlaws, in a work that echoes Lonesome Dove and News of the World.

Texas hill country, 1868. As nineteen-year-old Benjamin Shreve tends to business in his workshop, he witnesses a stagecoach strand a passenger. When the man, a treasure hunter, persuades Benjamin to help track down the vanished coach—and a mysterious fortune left aboard—Benjamin is drawn into a drama whose scope he could never have imagined, for they discover on reaching the coach that its passengers include Nell, a pregnant young woman, and her four-year-old son, Tot, who are fleeing Nell’s brutal husband and his murderous brothers.

Having told the Freedmen’s Bureau the whereabouts of her husband’s gang—a sadistic group wanted for countless acts of harassment and violence against Black citizens—Nell is in grave danger. If her husband catches her, he will kill her and take their son. Learning of their plight, Benjamin offers to deliver Nell and Tot to a distant port on the Gulf of Mexico, where they can board a ship to safety. He is joined in this chivalrous act by two other companions: the treasure hunter whose stranding began this endeavor and a restless Black Seminole who is a veteran of wars on both sides of the Rio Grande and who has an escape plan of his own.

Fraught with jeopardy from the outset, the trek across Texas becomes still more dangerous as buried secrets, including a cursed necklace, emerge. And even as Benjamin falls in love with Nell and imagines a life as Tot’s father, vengeful pursuers are never far behind. With its vivid characters and expansive canvas, The Madstone calls to mind Lonesome Dove, yet Elizabeth Crook’s new novel is a singular achievement. Told in Benjamin’s resolute and unforgettable voice, it is full of eccentric action, unrelenting peril, and droll humor—a thrilling and beautifully rendered story of three people sharing a hazardous and defining journey that will forever bind them together.

A historical drama based on the Battle of Blair Mountain, pitting a multi-ethnic army of 10,000 coal miners against mine owners, state militia, and the United States government in the largest labor uprising in American history.

Rednecks is a tour de force, big canvas historical novel that dramatizes the 1920 to 1921 events of the West Virginia Mine Wars―from the Matewan Massacre through the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest armed conflict on American soil since the Civil War, when some one million rounds were fired, bombs were dropped on Appalachia, and the term “redneck” would come to have an unexpected origin story.

Brimming with the high stakes drama of America’s buried history, Rednecks tells a powerful story of rebellion against oppression. In a land where the coal companies use violence and intimidation to keep miners from organizing, “Doc Moo” Muhanna, a Lebanese-American doctor (inspired by the author’s own great-grandfather), toils amid the blood and injustice of the mining camps. When Frank Hugham, a Black World War One veteran and coal miner, takes dramatic steps to lead a miners’ revolt with a band of fellow veterans, Doc Moo risks his life and career to treat sick and wounded miners, while Frank’s grandmother, Beulah, fights her own battle to save her home and grandson. Real-life historical figures burn bright among the hills: the fiery Mother Jones, an Irish-born labor organizer once known as “The Most Dangerous Woman in America,” struggles to maintain the ear of the miners (“her boys”) amid the tide of rebellion, while the sharp-shooting police chief “Smilin” Sid Hatfield dares to stand up to the “gun thugs” of the coal companies, becoming a folk hero of the mine wars.

Award-winning novelist Taylor Brown brings to life one of the most compelling events in 20th century American history, reminding us of the hard-won origins of today’s unions. Rednecks is a propulsive, character-driven tale that’s both a century old and blisteringly contemporary: a story of unexpected friendship, heroism in the face of injustice, and the power of love and community against all odds.