Forty Feet West

A widow's eastern boundary line has moved forty feet west. The corrected survey
is properly filed, the filing agent licensed, the paperwork in order. Nora
Vane's irrigation ditch - the one that waters her south field - now belongs to
the Creston Land Cooperative, which acquired the adjacent parcel six months ago.

Ward Colton arrives in Creel, New Mexico Territory, with a folder, a field
compass, and the kind of patience that makes dishonest men uncomfortable. He is
not looking for violence. He is looking for the first place the record stopped
being true.

What he finds in the Holt County filing index is not one fraudulent survey. It
is a pattern - small, unhurried, nearly invisible to anyone who doesn't know
what ink was commercially available in the territory in the fall of 1881. The
Creston Land Cooperative has been acquiring water access across the Meridian
Fork corridor one corrected boundary at a time, and the people who filed the
paperwork knew exactly what they were doing.

Forty Feet West is a quiet thriller set in the world of territorial land
records - where the real weapon is a notary seal and the most dangerous man in
the county is the one with a licensed surveyor on retainer.