Book description
A rattlesnake fang pegged in a teenager's eye is just the beginning of
a spring day for Posadas County Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman. The
injured lad's older brother goes missing, and is found dead in an
arroyo, apparently killed by his cartwheeling ATV. But most puzzling is
what the dead boy found moments before he was killed...an
astonishing discovery that takes deputies back to a five-year-old
killing. Soon Estelle and the now-retired Bill Gastner find themselves
looking for a murderer altogether too close to home. It's spring in
Posadas County, New Mexico, but Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman isn't
enjoying the weather. In fact, the high-desert landscape and its natural
inhabitants seem to have turned particularly malevolent, what with a
boy's eye being pierced by a rattlesnake fang and the discovery of a
jaguar skull reminding everyone of just what a forbidding place the
desert can be. The finding of the jaguar is connected to the accidental
death of a teenager, brother of the boy bit by the snake, and eventually
to more unearthed bones, but these are decidedly human and require
Reyes-Guzman and her former boss, retired sheriff Bill Gastner, to
unpeel the layers of a years'-old dispute turned violent. Havill is a
master at using procedural details to expose the complexities of
small-town relationships, but he also excels at drawing meaning from
landscape. Like an archaeologist sifting history from the ground,
Reyes-Guzman digs clues from the guano-splattered floor of the cave
where the jaguar's skull was found. One of the stronger entries in an
always-satisfying series. Steven F. Havill lives with his wife of more
than forty years, Kathleen, in Ratón, New Mexico. He is the author of
more than twenty novels set in the American west, taught secondary
schools for 25 years, and recently earned an AAS degree in gunsmithing.
