Kanab, Utah, is bitterly divided by the politics of land management. The conflict pits environmentalist David Greenbriar against the Citizens for a Free West. When the bullet-ridden body of Greenbriar is found, the county sheriff seeks help from newly appointed law enforcement ranger J. D. Books. Books discovers a possible witness to the murder, a reclusive teenager with a penchant for disappearing into the wilderness.

Books connects Greenbriar’s murder to a corrupt sheriff’s department deputy and a Las Vegas business conglomerate with ties to organized crime. Then a dangerous mob contract killer shows up who will stop at nothing to eliminate any evidence linking his employer to Greenbriar’s murder. The contract killer returns to Kanab to hunt down the missing teenage witness and for an inevitable showdown with Books.

A Sam Kincaid Mystery

The armored-car robbery went awry, leaving two people dead, one a member of the gang believed responsible for the crime. Forty-five-year-old Walter Bradshaw is captured and charged with capital murder and aggravated robbery. Bradshaw, who leads an archconservative, antigovernment group of Mormon polygamists, now sits in a cell at the Utah State Prison awaiting trial. The rest of the Bradshaw gang remains at large.

Then two days before Bradshaw’s preliminary hearing, one of two witnesses to the robbery is stabbed and bludgeoned to death, and that same evening, the second witness, a young woman student of the University of Utah, narrowly escapes being kidnapped. Cops Sam Kincaid and Kate McConnell figure it’s not just coincidence and must once again look beneath the obvious in an increasingly dangerous scenario.

Rolly and Abigail Rogers, residents of Kanab, Utah, come from a long line of dedicated pot hunters who scour the desert southwest in search of valuable antiquities. When the couple fails to return from a weekend “skeleton picnic,” a pot-hunting trip, along the desolate Arizona Strip, local Sheriff Charley Sutter enlists the help of J. D. Books, law enforcement ranger with the Bureau of Land Management.

When Books searches the missing couple’s home for clues about their disappearance, he discovers that the house has been burglarized and a valuable collection of ancient Anasazi and Fremont Indian antiquities has been stolen. Soon a search-and-rescue operation finds the Rogers’ truck and trailer at an abandoned campsite near an ancient Anasazi ruin that has been recently excavated. The evidence there leads Books to conclude that Rolly and Abigail were overpowered by a group of assailants.

Sheriff Sutter assigns an attractive young deputy, Beth Tanner, to investigate the burglary of the Rogers’ home under the watchful eye of Books. Together they track some of the stolen property to a pawn shop in the nearby town of St. George and, ultimately, to a young Navajo man with a criminal record and a serious drug problem. Keeping this man alive long enough to make him talk, however, proves difficult.

Books and Tanner soon learn of a shadowy group of armed Indian police who patrol vast areas of tribal and federal lands in search of anyone desecrating ancient Native American burial sites. They also discover other unsolved disappearances in the region. Could the disappearance of the Rogers and others be the responsibility of this group?

As Books and Tanner close in on those responsible, Books’ own survival skills will be tested when he is unwittingly drawn into a remote part of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. There he is forced into a deadly game of cat and mouse, in which the hunter becomes the hunted and only one person gets to go home alive.

Levi Vogue, chairman of the powerful Utah Board of Pardons and Parole, is gunned down in the driveway of his home as he returns from a late evening tryst with Sue Ann Winkler, an exotic dancer at a Salt Lake City strip club. Sam Kincaid, chief of the Special Investigations Branch of the Utah Department of Corrections, is assigned to help Salt Lake City Police Department homicide detective Lieutenant Kate McConnell solve Vogue’s murder. The investigation soon leads Kincaid and McConnell into the seedy world of prostitution and strip clubs.

The investigation focuses on Charles “Slick” Watts, a violent ex-convict with a long criminal history and a score to settle with Vogue. Then a body is discovered at an abandoned military base in Wendover, Nevada, and the medical examiner concludes that it was a homicide elaborately staged to look like a suicide. Kincaid and McConnell are forced to turn their attention to a complex conspiracy behind the killings. Ultimately, the investigation leads Kincaid and McConnell to a small elite group known as the Commission. As the police close in, the suspects turn first on each other and then on Kincaid.