The Styx and Stones

West Palm Beach, 1909.

Progress is coming—and it has a price.

Jerome Blake and his wife, Althea, arrive with plans to go legitimate. An icehouse. A clean front. A chance to turn blood money into permanence. But in a Florida boomtown built on railroads, resorts, and stolen land, legitimacy is just another hustle.

When Jerome learns that a Black settlement known as the Styx is slated for demolition—quietly sold out from under its residents—he and Althea make a dangerous choice. They use their underground connections to buy land, launder money, and build a parallel economy meant to secure their future and shield their community from erasure.

Power responds with force.

A corrupt sheriff turns law into leverage. Local elites weaponize petitions, raids, and false charges. The rules are clear: land belongs to those who can take it—and keep it. As pressure mounts, Jerome and Althea are driven deeper into violence, deception, and revenge, answering systemic injustice with choices that can't be undone.

Their marriage becomes both armor and fault line. Every win draws blood. Every step forward costs something permanent.

The Styx and Stones is a hard-edged historical crime noir about land as power, justice outside the law, and what survival demands when the system is designed to crush you.

Book Two of the Grit, Gamble & Grace series.