In the first book of a "promising" Southwestern mystery series, a Santa Fe PI's search for a stolen necklace leads to drugs, pornography, and murder ( The New York Times Book Review). As an associate at Santa Fe's Mondragon Detective Agency, Joshua Croft has heard a lot of strange proposals. But nothing stranger than when a cowboy comes in and asks him to help fence a stolen $100,000 necklace. Thinking he has a deal with Croft, the cowboy leaves as mysteriously as he arrived. The next day he turns up dead, riddled with bullets, and the insurance company that already settled the claim for the necklace's wealthy owners wants Croft's beautiful, wheelchair-bound boss, Rita Mondragon, and her agency to get the missing jewelry back. As Croft starts to dig into the slain cowboy's seedier, more sinister associates as well as the private lives of a privileged family with enough skeletons in their closets to populate a graveyard, he uncovers a lot more than some stolen jewels: pornography, drugs, Native American grave robbing, and multiple murders. Now he just has to stay alive long enough to put all the pieces together . . .
