Lantern Crossing

She lights the lamp for whoever's still out in the dark. She does not ask their color, their crimes, or their business. That is the whole art of keeping the Lantern alive — and the reason it is about to get her killed.

The Quill River diggings, autumn 1862. On the long, violent road to the gold camp at Saints' Rest, the Lantern is the last fair scale, the last safe table, the last honest water below Famine Pass. Loveday Pascoe keeps it the way her dead father taught her: salt at the table, quarrels at the door, the same weight for every soul who signs her book. Neutrality is her only shelter — and the ground beneath her feet was never patented, which means a banker's note come due at the quarter could take the whole of it with a stroke of the pen. So she keeps her face even, her fist unclenched, and lets no man on the road guess how thin the floor really is.

Then a quiet Black miner sets a fist of rust-veined gold in her keeping and is dead by morning — drowned at the ford, the Safety Committee says, a road agent who got what road agents get. But his terrified daughter comes running back to the one door she was told to trust. His strike is suddenly recorded in another man's name. And the dates in Loveday's own road-book quietly call the whole story a lie.

With the first snow closing Famine Pass, the camp's most respected man courting her hand, and a very correct captain who reads Scripture over the men he hangs, Loveday must decide what a keeper owes the dead — and the living — when telling the truth could cost her everything her father built.

Written in spare, luminous prose as clean and steady as the flame in the window, Lantern Crossing is a frontier mystery about honest scales in a crooked country, and the terrible price of neutrality when a child is watching you through the glass.