Short Count (Book One)

Twelve years after a crop blight broke the American heartland, four armed enclaves keep the peace by counting each other's guns. Emory Aske does the counting — until a courier turns up dead holding a seal that shouldn't exist.

When a courier turns up dead in a sinkhole clutching a Tally seal that shouldn't exist, aging weapons inspector Emory Aske has ten days to trace a flood of black-market primers before a hungry garrison seizes the valley's grain. The trail runs through a primer works whose books are too clean, a smuggler's island, and weapons he signed off as destroyed ten years ago. He can't outfight the men behind it. He will have to out-count them.

Book One of The Tally. By M. C. Varlow.