When Joanna Brady's daughter, Jenny, stumbles across the body of her high school principal, Debra Highsmith, in the desert, the Cochise County sheriff's personal and professional worlds collide, forcing her to tread the difficult middle ground between being an officer of the law and a mother. While investigating murders has always meant discovering unpleasant facts and disquieting truths, the experienced Joanna isn't prepared for the knowledge she's...

A man is dragged by a speeding car along a deserted stretch of road i Phoenix. Starting with this gruesome crime, a killer begins a grisly murder spree across the Southwest. A hundred miles away, Ali Reynolds is grieving over a lost job and her deceased philandering husband. When a member of the family who gave Ali a college scholarship asks her for a meeting, Ali wonders what it can mean. Before she can satisfy her curiosity, Ali learns that a friend's...

Diana Ladd's life stopped six years ago when her husband killed himself after being accused of the brutal rape and murder of a young Indian woman. Working among Native American children in the peace of the open desert, Diana has just begun to put her life back together. Now a ruthless, psychotic killer blames Diana for the time he spent in prison, and he is out to destory her. Andrew Carlisle has been let out on parole, and he is determined that both...

Police academy-trained former reporter Ali Reynolds is contacted to investigate the grisly murder of a gold-digging divorcee on behalf of a woman accused of the crime. Lynn Martinson is dating the dead woman's ex-husband, and she and her boyfriend Chip Ralston have been charged. Ali is simultaneously drawn to the case of A.J. Sanders, a frightened teen with secrets of his own. He's the first to find the body in the Camp Verde desert when he goes...

"The investigation of LaShawn Tompkins's murder seems straightforward enough. Upon his release from death row, the ex-drug dealer returned to his old neighborhood, where he was gunned down on his mother's doorstep. Just another case of turf warfare." "At least that's what it looks like on the surface to Seattle investigator J. P. Beaumont, who's been handed the assignment under the strictest confidence. But as Beau starts digging, the situation becomes...

Dora Matthews and Jennifer Brady, both thirteen, couldn't be less alike yet the luck of the draw has made them tentmates on a Girl Scout camping trip at Apache Pass. Dora is a wild child, a pregnant, fatherless waif with a missing junkie mother. Jenny is the innocent daughter of Joanna Brady, the sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona. In the cool blackness of the high desert night, they slip away at Dora's prodding. What they find on their unauthorized...

The traditions of the Tohono O'odham people are woven into the fabric of three families as Dr. Lani Walker and Pima County homicide investigator Brian Fellows join forces to protect a little girl who witnessed her mother's murder.

Sheriff Joanna Brady has a lot on her plate--she is up for re-election as sheriff, pregnant with her third child, and her eldest is packing up to leave for college. Then Joanna is woken in the middle of the night by a call reporting a motor vehicle accident. Her mother and stepfathers RV ran off the road at high speed and hit the pillar of an overpass. Something about the accident seems suspicious, though, and when Joanna gets a call from Ali Reynolds,...

The end of her high-profile broadcasting career came too soon for TV journalist Alison Reynolds when she was bounced off the air by executives who wanted a "younger face." With a divorce from her cheating husband of ten years also pending, there is nothing keeping her in L.A. any longer. Cut loose from her moorings, Ali is summoned back home to Sedona, Arizona, by the death of a childhood friend. Once there she seeks solace in the comforting rhythms...

In the heat of the Arizona desert, a raging fire pushed temperatures to a deadly degree, and one woman is left to burn. Pulled naked and barely breathing from the fire, the victim has no idea who she is, let alone who would do this to her - or why. In her hospital bed she drifts in and out of consciousness, her only means of communicating a blink of the eye. And then an angel appears. Misguidedly known around town as the "Angel of Death," Sister Anselm...