Caleb5514
Murder mystery/thriller/western/pioneer novel
The road west promised land. It delivered blood.
Missouri, 1843. Nineteen-year-old Dan Kincaid follows his father into the great migration to Oregon, packed into a creaking wagon with his mother, brothers, sisters, a locked strongbox, and more family secrets than food. Daniel Kincaid calls the journey a chance at a new life. Dan knows better. His father is running from old debts, old crimes, and a past that has learned to follow.
At first, the trail offers only the expected miseries: mud, hunger, broken wheels, sick lungs, and the endless grind of oxen toward a country none of them has seen. Then disaster begins to strike too precisely to be chance. A death in the wagon. A body in the mud. A rope cut at the wrong moment. A child taken into the trees.
As fear turns the Kincaids against one another, Dan must decide which danger is worse: the enemies watching from the ridges, or the secrets riding inside the wagon.
Bleak, suspenseful, and fiercely intimate, When the Wheel Broke is a historical frontier thriller about family, survival, and the terrible things people carry when there is nowhere left to run.