Cole Briggs wasn’t looking for trouble. He was looking for his grandfather’s tax records.

What he found instead — in a sealed tin box in the cellar of a barn his great-great-grandfather built in 1882 — was a document that someone has been willing to kill for since the day it was written. The Canyon Compact is part land record, part founding covenant, and part confession: a carefully worded account of a man’s murder on the Hole-in-the-Rock trail in the winter of 1878, and the land transfer that followed six months later, that built the foundation of one of the most powerful private land empires in the modern American West.

Raymond Ashford is sixty-one years old, silver-haired, and genuinely charming. He has been photographed with senators from both parties. He has an endowed chair at the University of Utah. He gives a very good speech about the future of the American landscape. He also has a professional security contractor named Marcus Leer, a BLM district director on his informal payroll, and a false will and testament already filed with the Kane County probate office — leaving Cole’s land to a Veridian shell entity — prepared and notarized before the first attempt on Cole’s life.

Cole is a retired Marine infantry rifleman with a bad knee, eleven hundred acres of canyon country range, and a lifetime of knowing every wash, rim trail, and slot canyon on his family’s land. He has no lawyer. He has no institutional protection. He has a cousin named Travis, a seventy-two-year-old neighbor named Darlene Hoyt whose husband died twenty-five years ago asking the same questions Cole is asking, and the specific, settled quality of a man who has been shot at before and learned that the most important thing is to still be moving when it’s over.

They burned his house. They took his equipment. They came for him in the night in the canyon country of southern Utah and he was not where they expected him to be. He still has the document. He still has the land. And Raymond Ashford is beginning to understand, too late, that the most dangerous thing he ever did was give Cole Briggs a reason to fight.

Canyon Compact is the first novel in the Cole Briggs, Patriot trilogy — a survival thriller set in one of the most isolated and spectacular landscapes in America, where the nearest help is an hour away and the only real advantage a man has is knowing the ground under his feet better than the people trying to put him in it.