The Good Land

The Willamette Valley, Oregon. October 1896. The hop harvest is in, the Bryan-McKinley election is five weeks away, and the valley looks like exactly what people have always called it: the promised land.

Josiah Pell didn't look like a man whose heart would fail. He walked two miles every morning, kept meticulous accounts, and had spent the last three months in the county land records office tracing a problem with the property titles along the south fork — titles that traced back to a Methodist Mission land grant from 1838 and a conveyance agent who may not have had authority to sign what he signed. Three days before his appointment with a Portland attorney, he was dead.

Reverend Elias Cane arrives in the most settled, most prosperous, most thoroughly churched community he has ever ridden into and finds a murder designed to disappear inside fifty years of respectable history. A hop farmer's daughter kept her father's notes. A half-Kalapuya woman knows what this land was before the grant. And a county physician signed a death certificate without asking the question that mattered.

The valley remembers what it prefers to forget.

The Good Land — the eleventh Circuit Rider Mystery from Jim Head.