Texas hill country, 1868. As 19-year-old Benjamin Shreve tends to business in his workshop, he witnesses a stagecoach strand a passenger. The man, a treasure hunter, persuades Benjamin to help track down the vanished coach and a mysterious fortune left aboard. Its passengers include Nell, a pregnant young woman, and her four-year-old son, Tot, who are fleeing Nell’s brutal husband and his murderous brothers. Having told the Freedmen’s Bureau the whereabouts of her husband’s gang --- a sadistic group wanted for countless acts of harassment and violence against Black citizens --- Nell is in grave danger. Learning of their plight, Benjamin offers to deliver Nell and Tot to a distant port on the Gulf of Mexico, where they can board a ship to safety.

Early one morning, a panther savagely attacks a family of homesteaders, mauling a young girl named Samantha and killing her mother. Samantha and her half-brother, Benjamin, survive, but she is left traumatized. THE WHICH WAY TREE is the story of Samantha's unshakeable resolve to stalk and kill the infamous panther and avenge her mother's death. In their quest, she and Benjamin enlist a charismatic Tejano outlaw and a haunted, compassionate preacher with an aging but relentless tracking dog. As the members of this unlikely posse hunt the panther, they are in turn pursued by a hapless but sadistic Confederate soldier with troubled family ties to the preacher and a score to settle.

On an oppressively hot Monday in August of 1966, a student and former marine named Charles Whitman hauled a footlocker of guns to the top of the University of Texas tower and began firing on pedestrians below. Before it was over, 16 people had been killed and 32 wounded. It was the first mass shooting of civilians on a campus in American history. Elizabeth Crook's latest novel, MONDAY, MONDAY, follows three students caught up in the massacre.