A frontier capital that believes its own paperwork. A murdered records clerk. A surveying firm that bears his dead father's name. The acclaimed Thorne & Linus historical mystery series reaches its sixth installment.

In the snowbound territorial capital of Carson City, Nevada, every street, lot, and land claim is filed and certified—and whoever controls the record controls the truth. So when the one clerk who knew the old survey plats by heart is found dead behind a bolted office door the morning of his appointment with surveyor Silas Thorne, the official cause is a tired heart. Silas reads a freshly cleaned inkwell, a locked room, and a half-drawn plat that says two townships cannot both be.

Silas Thorne measures the ground; his partner, the gambler Linus Calloway, measures the men. Together they have followed the bearing left by Silas's vanished father across five commissions and five Western towns. In Carson City the bearing finally becomes an address: a drafting shop wearing the family name, eleven forged surveys filed under eleven honest men, and a single forger's hand certified by a single official seal. With a federal land inspector circling and a recording officer hiding behind the law itself, Silas must prove a murder no certificate admits—and decide whether he is chasing his father's name to clear it or to claim it at last.

Perfect for listeners of historical murder mysteries, frontier and Western fiction, and slow-burn detective novels in the tradition of Charles Portis, Larry McMurtry, and Sherlock Holmes–style deduction, The Carson Ledger delivers period-accurate 1880s surveying, courtroom-style reckoning, and a father-and-son mystery measured to the inch.

Each Thorne & Linus mystery stands alone as a complete case—but the bearing always holds south.

Listen to the series in order:

The Latitude of Lies

A Compass for the Dead

The Meridian Murder

The Surveyor's Veil

The Iron Meridian

The Carson Ledger