Fr. "Jake" Jakubowski, a 70-year-old Michigan priest temporarily assigned to a New Mexican village, helps Detective Sonia Mora investigate a fetus found in an irrigation sluice, which prompts reopening a cold case about the death of a wealthy rancher's wife. The picketing of a soldier's funeral that turns deadly; a brash anthropologist's excavation for Civil War Apache scout remains; and Mexican folk healing customs to cure a daughter of the debilitating effects of her father's Prolonged Grief Disorder, propel the plot amid a stunning landscape of contemporary New Mexico.

In a...