Charlie Moon is treading on sacred ground...and he may live to regret it. The two sandstone monoliths -- a pair of massive natural giants towering over the southern Colorado landscape -- that stand before the hulking, good-natured former policeman turned rancher are wrapped in rich tribal lore and dark, ancient mystery. To the local Navajo, Pueblo, and Ute, they are the Twin War Gods, sons of the moon goddess White Shell Woman. Legends tell of strange happenings in their shadows, whisperedtales of fire and famine, lost treasure, and blood sacrifice. But it is a much more recent history that troubles Charlie Moon, specifically the fresh corpse of a young Native American woman unearthed at an archaelogical dig, corroborated eyewitness accounts of a nightmarish figure appearing and disappearing abruptly in the darkness of the Colorado night...and the discovery of the qrisly remains of an old Navajo who seems to have spontaneously combusted.Charlie's aunt, Daisy Perika -- an aging, cantankerous Ute shaman prone to frightening visions of death and catastrophe -- has warned her nephew away from this haunted place. No good can come, she tells him, from violating cursed ruins where Anasazi priests have consigned the lives of innocents to sacrificial flames.But Charlie Moon's insatiable appetite for heavy, greasy food and good living is surpassed only by his love for justice and the truth. Though the truth Aunt Daisy's words have rung loud internal alarm bells, the dedicated onetime lawman is unwilling to abandon his murder investigation. Somewhere, he believes, in this bizarre tangle of ancient and modern-day evils are answers grounded more in contemporary greed and cold-blooded malice than in thousand-year-old superstitions. Digging too deep, however, could prove fatal, as death cuts an ever-widening swath through the local Native American community, And without the protection of the badge he relinquished, Charlie soon find himself the guest of honor on his funeral pyre.
JAMES D. DOSS is the author of twelve Charlie Moon mysteries, two of which were named one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly. Originally from Kentucky, he divides his time between Los Alamos and Taos, New Mexico.
