A skeleton buried in a makeshift stone grave is discovered on a remote bluff overlooking Labyrinth Canyon in southeast Utah. Cause of death: a bullet to the back of the head. The victim turns out to be a controversial investigative journalist from New York City who moved to Moab a few years earlier for some peace and quiet. That's what he found, but only for a little while. He couldn't shut off his investigative instincts and that eventually cost him his life. Even small towns have secrets worth killing for. Manny Rivera, a Grand County deputy sheriff, is assigned the case. In pursuit of the...

Protesters in downtown Moab are demonstrating against pothunters who defile ancient-Indian graves in search of valuable artifacts. A manifesto threatening stronger action in retaliation for the pothunting is received by the local newspaper. Soon thereafter, a San Francisco artifact collector is found murdered in a remote part of the LaSal Mountains. In his backpack is a freshly-dug ancient-Indian pot. Subsequent acts of lawless defiance emphasize the serious nature of the protest. Deputy Sheriff Manny Rivera is assigned the job of tracking down the cold-blooded killer. His investigation takes...

In the quiet library of his luxurious penthouse apartment in Washington, DC, Wallace Lamont, Chairman of a large industrial conglomerate, plots the defeat of Congressman Matthew Monroe in the upcoming primary election. The Congressman, a staunch environmentalist from southern Utah, is blocking a large contract that Lamont's firm desperately needs. Lamont's plan is to resurrect the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1980s, a time when the hard working citizens who lived in the West and used public lands for cattle grazing, timber cutting, and mining, fought against the Bureau of Land Management and...

New clues in an old, unsolved murder case lead Deputy Sheriff Manny Rivera from Moab, Utah, to a small, remote village in the mountains of northern New Mexico. With reluctant and sometimes non-existent assistance from the local sheriff, he enters a community of people unwilling to open up with him because of a centuries-old distrust of outsiders-outsiders were the ones who stole their land grant. He slowly penetrates their hardened attitude toward strangers and learns about a series of bizarre events which took place there fifteen years ago. As layers of the case are peeled away, he begins to...