The Lease

At 2:17 in the morning, Jack Mercer finds his friend dead beside an abandoned oil well in Brazoria County. The scene is supposed to look like an accident. It doesn’t.

Hidden nearby is a 1987 oil-and-gas lease, an old survey map, and a photograph tied to one of Texas’s most powerful energy families. What begins as a suspicious death pulls Jack and his wife, Kate, into a buried history of mineral rights, secret drilling, vanished records, family bloodlines, and a program powerful men have protected for decades. The deeper Jack digs, the more personal the conspiracy becomes—and beneath the Texas Gulf Coast lies a secret worth far more than oil.