Emmett Lacey is eighteen years old, broke, and hungry for a name worth remembering.
When a cattle boss named Dutch brings him into the orbit of Thomas Blackwell - a man whose name alone can make grown men go pale - Emmett gets what he asked for. A place in an outfit. A Colt revolver he names Mercy. And a path that leads from riding drag on a stolen herd to standing in the road with a bandana over his face and a gun in his hand.
Set in the Arizona Territory in the early 1880s, The Name You Keep follows a young man's descent into the outlaw life of Cochise County - from the cattle trails south of the Dragoons to the saloons of Tombstone to a canyon ambush in the Chiricahuas that changes everything. As Emmett climbs deeper into Blackwell's machinery, he discovers that the name he's been building is also a cage - constructed from the things he's done to earn it, held together by the things he can never undo.
A novel about ambition, violence, and the distance between who you are and who the territory makes you, The Name You Keep is a literary Western in the tradition of the great outlaw stories of the American frontier.
