Books by Hank Redding

The Reckoning of Silver Butte

A Town Ruled by Fear. A Man Who Stopped Running.

A forgotten town, a buried corruption, and a reckoning that comes without warning.

What Was Carried West

A Novel

They were not the first men to cross the desert, and they would not be the last. But what they carried would decide who remained. After a gold wagon is ambushed in a storm-scarred cut, the survivors move west under weight they refuse to name. As distance grows and water thins, survival becomes an act of arithmetic—measuring strength, choosing burdens, and deciding which futures are worth carrying forward. This is not a story of pursuit or justice, but of selection, consequence, and the quiet mathematics of leaving someone behind.

Dust Will Tell

A quiet Western about consequences, memory, and the truths that surface long after the dust settles.

The Rider Who Never Stayed

A Novel

A man arrives in a town that seems to know him. No one asks his name. No one explains the rules. The work has already begun. In a frontier settlement governed by ritual rather than law, a rider who has made a life of never staying is drawn into a system designed to function without memory, mercy, or witnesses. His role is not to decide guilt or innocence, but to ensure that the sequence completes itself cleanly. When a single interruption fractures the process, he is forced to confront what happens when order persists without closure—and what remains when a record is left unfinished. Quiet, unsettling, and exacting, this is a novel about what we carry when we leave—and what follows when something is not allowed to end.

Grave Creek

Some Debts Can’t Stay Buried

In a town built on memory and omission, the past refuses to remain quiet.

The Last Good Rope

A Novel of Silence, Judgment, and the West

A restrained and haunting Western that asks how much silence a man can live with before it condemns him.

What Remains

In the town of Ashbarrow, the river doesn’t just carry water; it hides what it takes. When a young boy witnesses a secret in the mud, he realizes that the ones who stay aren’t those who are innocent—they are the ones who know how to keep living anyway. As a buried iron badge resurfaces and the manor house on the hill tightens its grip, a local shopkeeper must decide if she will maintain the town’s hollow silence or finally acknowledge the true weight of the truth.

Whiskey for the Dead

A dark Western about debt, memory, and what won’t stay buried.

The Weight of the Record

A Free Introduction to Hank Redding

A quiet, atmospheric Western about memory, consequence, and the things towns choose to remember—or bury. Offered free as an introduction to Hank Redding’s work.

Anchor Point

A Novel

The railroad never came to Anchor Point. There was no fire. No flood. No official notice. The line simply turned south, and the town was left standing where it had been promised something that never arrived. When a federal clerk is sent west to reconcile an unresolved discrepancy in a railroad survey, he discovers a place that was never destroyed—only bypassed. What follows is not an investigation, but a reckoning with what it means to correct a record when the truth refuses to close.

What the Ground Knows

A Novel

In a frontier town built on efficiency, justice is not debated—it is demonstrated. Public hangings, quiet interrogations, and unexplained disappearances maintain a fragile order that most residents accept as the cost of survival. When a woman is executed for a murder she did not commit, the town closes ranks, confident that repetition will bury doubt as it always has. But some systems fail not through rebellion, but through memory. As an outsider begins to notice what the town has trained itself not to see—patterns of absence, violence that arrives too quickly, and truths disposed of rather than resolved—the mechanisms of control turn inward. What follows is not redemption, but exposure. Quiet, unsettling, and exacting, this is a Western novel about violence as civic function, silence as collective agreement, and what happens when the ground refuses to forget.

Ash in the Wagon Ruts

A Western Mystery

Two men haul a crate through the night, following wagon ruts worn so deep they’ve become part of the land. The town ahead pretends not to know what’s inside — or why it keeps arriving.