Cole Briggs won the first round. He knows better than to call it a victory.

Raymond Ashford lost a permit case and a county commissioner and endured a week of regional news coverage. He also filed a false will in Cole’s name before the first attempt on his life, burned Cole’s ranch to the foundation, and put a bullet in Cole’s cousin. What looks like a defeat to the outside world is, to Ashford, a calibration. He now knows what Cole is. He knows what Cole has. And he has retained a professional named Marcus Leer whose operational record contains no failures and whose current assignment has a simple objective: make Cole Briggs cease to exist before the Canyon Compact reaches a federal courtroom.

Cole has no house. He has no lawyer on retainer, no institutional protection, and no fixed address. He has the canyon country of southern Utah, which he has known since he could walk, and a document in a waterproof canteen that connects Raymond Ashford’s entire fortune to a murder committed in 1878. He has a federal prosecutor in Denver who is interested but cautious. He has a historian in witness protection and a BLM official who is beginning to understand that the bridge he has been standing on has an end. And he has his cousin Travis — nine years sober, father of a seven-year-old girl — who came back to Kanab because Cole asked him to, and who is now the most exposed person in the fight. What Cole doesn’t have is time. Leer’s operation is systematic, well-resourced, and closing. The legal case Cole has been building from the canyon floor is one document short of airtight, and getting that document means going to Salt Lake City — Leer’s territory — under a false identity, in a building that Veridian’s corporate research account has been monitoring for eight months. Someone Cole trusted has been feeding his position to the enemy. The Canyon Compact alone may not be enough. And in the fight’s darkest hour, Cole will learn exactly what it costs to ask the people closest to him to stand in the line of fire.

The Long Survey is the second novel in the Cole Briggs, Patriot trilogy — darker, faster, and more costly than the first. It ends in a federal courtroom victory and a cliffhanger that changes everything, as a man who has just lost everything runs to a country without extradition and retains someone whose specialty is not litigation.

The canyon country remembers what happened here. So does Cole Briggs. But Raymond Ashford is not done, and the worst is still coming.