Front Range

He signed for four million dollars. The report says $640,000.

Ezra Holt drives a plumbing van that isn't one. Its floor safe carries cash for Colorado's cannabis trade, legal on one side of the street and a federal crime on the other. Same lot, same time, every Tuesday. He has written two memos about that.

Then a special run before dawn on a December Thursday ends on a frontage road outside the city with the safe empty and his partner, Luis, dead. Ezra loaded the bags himself: eleven of them, $4,180,000 on a count sheet he signed. By breakfast the loss has been reported as $640,000, a lawyer has already filed the insurance claim, the count sheet is gone, and everyone with a stake in the money would like Ezra to remember it differently.

He won't.

A woman from Mexico City who moves money for people who never forgive came to Denver to watch that cash arrive. Now she is staying to find out where it went. A Denver cannabis founder is two weeks from selling his dispensaries and psychedelic healing centers, and every dollar has to look clean before the buyer's auditors show up. A state investigator whose debts are owned by the wrong person is handling the paperwork. And Ezra once promised Luis's older brother he would look after him.

Ezra is a former Army bomb technician. He is quiet, he is patient, and he counts things, because counting is the one thing nobody can talk him out of.

From the brick storefronts of South Broadway to the wheat fields past Bennett, Front Range is a crime novel about money, grief and the cost of insisting on the true number.