A debut novel and darkly funny spy thriller in the vein of Slow Horses and The Sisters Brothers, featuring a teenage girl who witnesses the murder of a secret agent and is roped into a world of espionage, with national security secrets and her family’s livelihood on the line.

With her family’s farm on the brink of foreclosure, sixteen-year-old Janey is forced to go to Des Moines to make some money. In 1955 Iowa, that starts with secretarial school. But on the train to the big city, a chance encounter with two armed assassins sworn to kill each other pulls her into the center of a cat-and-mouse chase.

When a mysterious agent slips her a hidden object moments before his murder, Janey becomes the target of ruthless, bumbling operatives who are convinced she holds secret information that is key to winning the Cold War.

Armed with her wits and the lessons she learned from her late mother, Janey fights her way across cornfields, city streets, and a maze of deception, dominating everyone in her way, to everyone’s surprise but her own. As bodies pile up and loyalties blur, Janey must decide who she is in a world that doesn’t believe in her. She just wants to get home to the farm, and she’s willing to do whatever it takes to get there.

A gripping blend of coming-of-age grit and Cold War intrigue, Crack Shot is a sharp story about survival, identity, and the cost of being underestimated.