The Last Timber Road

Jake Mercer has spent two decades building roads through remote forest for timber companies that pay well and ask few questions. On Harlan Timber's latest northern expansion project, the job seems simple enough: reach the ridge, open the old-growth section, and keep the schedule moving. But the deeper the crew pushes into the forest, the more the land resists easy explanation. The birds have gone quiet. The maps stop telling the whole story. The survey data is thin, the pressure from management keeps rising, and environmental surveyor Leah Carter starts noticing things the company would rather ignore. Beyond the ridge lies something no one on the official plans accounted for: a hidden settlement with roots in an old corporate crime and a legal claim that could unravel everything Harlan Timber believes it owns. As deadlines tighten and loyalties fracture, Jake finds himself caught between the men he works beside, the company calling the numbers, and the people living at the far end of the last timber road. Set in the cold silence of remote old-growth country, The Last Timber Road is a tense, atmospheric novel about work, greed, land, and the moment a man realizes the life he built has brought him to the edge of something he can no longer justify.