Reckonings

2021 Next Generation Indie Book Award Winner (YA Fiction) 2021 WILLA Award Finalist (YA Fiction) The trouble with being too smart for your own good is you're "too smart" to know it-until it's too late.Living with her single mom in tiny La Via, Arizona, sixteen-year-old Etta Baker has grown up independent and headstrong-and definitely too smart for her own good.It's just after WWII and evil men are expanding drug trafficking across the West. Her mother's new boyfriend is one of them. When he kills Etta's mother and disappears, Etta is determined to bring him to justice.She impulsively tracks down her mother's long-lost older brother to enlist his aid. A former lawman, he's now a drunken and disgruntled war veteran and wants nothing to do with her troubles. But Etta ignores her uncle's dire warnings about the dangers of her plan and shames him into helping her.On horseback, they track the murderer and his gang through the wilderness of The Sierra Crest, where the beauty of the landscape quickly gives way to deadly violence, both natural and man-made, and forces Etta to do what she could never have imagined in order to save both their lives.