The Canyon Compact (Cole Briggs, Patriot)
They burned his house down. They shot his cousin. They filed his will before he was dead.
Cole Briggs is still standing.
Some fights find you whether you’re looking for them or not. Cole Briggs was looking for his grandfather’s tax records when he found a sealed tin box in the cellar of a barn built in 1882 — and inside it, a document that a very powerful man has spent thirty years making sure nobody ever found. The Canyon Compact is a founding covenant of the Escalante settlements, written by men who wanted the truth to exist somewhere even if they couldn’t act on it. It records a murder. It names a family. And the man who inherited everything that murder made possible has already decided what needs to happen to Cole Briggs.
Cole Briggs, Patriot is a trilogy of survival thrillers set in the canyon country of Kane and Garfield Counties, Utah — some of the most dramatic and isolated terrain in the American West, where cell service is a rumor and the nearest trauma center is ninety minutes away on a good road. Raymond Ashford has money, federal relationships, lawyers in five states, and a professional security contractor named Marcus Leer who has never failed a primary objective. Cole Briggs has eleven hundred acres of red rock range, a lifetime of knowing every canyon, wash, and rim trail on his family’s land, and the specific, practiced calm of a man who has been in bad situations before and learned that panic is the first thing that kills you.
This is not a story about a man who wins because he’s the hero. It is a story about a man who refuses to stop — at enormous, specific, personal cost — because some things are worth more than safety, and some truths have been buried long enough.
Three novels. One fight. And a document that has been waiting a hundred and forty-six years for someone stubborn enough to do something about it.
Book 1 Canyon Compact
When retired Marine Cole Briggs finds a sealed document in his grandfather's cellar connecting a powerful Utah land dynasty to a murder committed in 1878, he becomes the target of a professional elimination campaign funded by the man whose entire fortune depends on that document staying buried. Cole has no lawyers, no backup, and no institutional protection — only his knowledge of the canyon country his family has worked for four generations and the hard-won calm of a man who has survived bad situations before. Canyon Compact is a dark, relentless survival thriller that moves from the corridors of federal power to the slot canyons of southern Utah, where Raymond Ashford's money and Marcus Leer's professionalism run up against the one thing they didn't plan for: a man who knows the ground and refuses to leave it.
eBook ASIN: soon Paperback ISBN: 978-1-953645-55-5
Coming soon!
Book 2 The Long Survey
Cole Briggs survived the first round with nothing but the Canyon Compact, a Glock, and the canyon country his family has worked for four generations. The second round is worse. Operating homeless and hunted in the Utah wilderness, Cole races to build an airtight federal fraud case while Marcus Leer's professional security operation closes the net around everyone Cole has left — including the cousin whose life is now being used as leverage. The Long Survey is a relentless, punishing thriller in which Cole's only advantages are terrain he knows better than the men hunting him and a refusal to stop that costs him more with every chapter — building to a legal victory, a devastating personal loss, and a cliffhanger that makes Book Three feel not just inevitable but urgent.
eBook ASIN: soon Paperback ISBN: 978-1-953645-56-2
Coming soon!
Book 3 What the Land Keeps
Raymond Ashford is in Portugal, out of reach but not done — he's left behind Warren Dell, a Phoenix attorney whose clients' legal opponents have a troubling habit of ceasing to be problems, and Dell has been on Ashford's payroll since before the ranch burned. With a federal trial six weeks away and Dell targeting everyone Cole has left, Cole must fight on a new front — one where terrain knowledge means nothing and the weapon aimed at him is the one thing he has never been able to fully make peace with. What the Land Keeps is the trilogy's detonation: every thread, every loss, and every decision across three novels arriving simultaneously, building to a verdict that was never guaranteed and a ending earned in the specific, costly way that only the truth — kept long enough, fought for hard enough — can be earned.
eBook ASIN: soon Paperback ISBN: 978-1-953645-57-9
Coming soon!
copyright © 2026 Don Gannon-Jones.