The Stranger

In Darkwater, being young and female doesn’t amount to much. But Chelsea’s luckier than most. She’s the lover of the town’s feared leader, which she keeps telling herself is a good thing, what with the food getting scarce and the wells drying up. She’s secure and safe and can almost believe she’s happy.

But when a stranger rides into town, gun on one hip, whip on the other, Chelsea can’t look away. Especially when it turns out this stranger is a woman.

Nobody can say what the stranger is there for. But she brings talk of an outside perhaps no longer so chaotic and she knows far too much about the dark choices made in this town, back when the world outside was falling apart.

As the rumours fly about Darkwater’s bloodied past and the murder of a woman twenty years earlier, Chelsea finds herself being drawn into someone else’s terrifying quest for justice. Or is it merely revenge?

In a place ruled by fear, Chelsea’s going to have to decide whose side she’s really on, and how far she’s prepared to go, to uncover the town’s secrets, before more blood soaks the ground of Darkwater – this time, perhaps her own.