Margaret Eastman, recently widowed, has started receiving unrequested authentication paperwork for pieces of her late husband's forty-year Civil War collection - battlefield photographs, a presentation sword, a portrait with a hundred and sixty years of provenance behind it. Nothing was stolen. Nothing was reported missing. Somebody just wants it on paper that something might be wrong. It should be a two-day job. It isn't. What Derek finds beneath the paperwork is a forgery operation running through a respected regional arts foundation, funded by objects nobody thought to guard because nobody thought a widow's collection was worth stealing - anchored, quietly, to a mineral rights position worth more than the whole town put together. The woman running it has never once needed to raise her voice.

She has better tools: a harassment suit, a compromised deputy, a town that starts wondering out loud about the people who used to be above suspicion. Derek has no badge in Antler Shed and no jurisdiction beyond what a license and a stubborn sense of obligation can buy him. What he has is a notebook, a partner who won't back down even when it costs her a career, and a building full of people who taught him, without meaning to, what it actually looks like to stay. Some cases end in an arrest. This one ends in an accounting. Forged Ground is the second novel in the Derek Rockling Investigations series, for readers of C.J. Box and Craig Johnson who want their Wyoming crime fiction to cost something.