In for a Penny

Set in Depression-era Mississippi, In for a Penny is a Southern Gothic tragedy steeped in sorrow, vengeance, and Southern soil. When the Tucker brothers-John and Lowell-buy the land their family has worked for generations, it feels like deliverance. But as the banks collapse and the rains won't stop, they watch their corn rot in the field, their cotton blacken on the stalk, and their children go hungry.

When Clara Tucker dies, buried beneath a pecan tree near the creek that once marked their land, the women-Ellie and Mae-carry what's left: the cooking, the raising, the mourning. The men carry the weight of failure and the fire of something darker.

What begins as grief becomes legend. The brothers turn outlaw, striking back at the men who profit from the poor. As things turn deadly, a lost brother returns for justice-Delta justice.

With lyricism, grit, and aching beauty, Romer Shaw delivers a haunting hymn of land, loss, and the desperate lengths people go to when the world forgets them. In for a Penny is not just a story of men-it's the story of the soil they stood on, the women who held them up, and the price of believing justice can grow where nothing else will.

*In for a Penny and Salt of the Earth are companion novellas*

Author's Bio:

Romer Shaw was born in New Orleans, raised on stories older than the soil, and called-again and again-back to the Mississippi Delta.

His roots stretch through generations of Mississippi blood, but it's more than lineage that binds him to that land. It's a pull. A presence. Something spiritual. As if the alluvial earth itself had a claim on his soul.

Writing in the tradition of Faulkner, Baldwin, Woodrell, and Mosley, Romer crafts Southern Gothic stories soaked in memory, fire, and moral reckoning. His work centers the Delta-its ghosts, its heat, its brutal beauty-as both character and curse.

He now lives in Northwest Montana, where the mountains keep their own kind of silence-but the Delta still speaks. Always.