The Wages of Lead

"The wages of sin is death." — Romans 6:23

In the silver mines of Silverado, Colorado, a man can disappear underground and no one asks too many questions. The ore keeps coming up. The company keeps paying. And the dead stay buried.

Thomas Greer spent three months writing it all down — the rotting timbers, the flooded shafts, the foremen who threatened workers who complained. He sent his findings to a Denver newspaper and waited for someone to act. Six days later, he was dead at the bottom of Shaft Nine. The company called it an accident.

His widow, Clara, calls it murder.

When Reverend Elias Cane rides into Silverado to hold a Sunday service, he finds a town that belongs to the Consolidated Silver Company — its housing, its store, its church, its law. Men who ask questions lose their jobs. Women who speak out lose their homes. And a circuit rider who starts looking into a dead miner's notes might find himself looking down a very deep shaft.

But Cane has faced worse than company men. He carries a Bible in one saddlebag and a clarity born of thirty years riding hard country in the other. He believes every soul has worth — including the ones the company has decided are expendable.

The Wages of Lead is the third book in The Circuit Rider Mysteries, a series of historical mysteries set in the 1880s American West. Each book stands alone. All of them ask the same question: in a land where power makes its own rules, what does justice cost — and who is willing to pay it?

For readers who love historical mysteries with faith at their core, rugged Western settings, and heroes who fight for the forgotten.