Shallow Grave

It’s horrifying to watch someone die.

My partner and I witnessed a fatality during a routine surveillance case—a case that took a bizarre turn when we questioned the victim’s wife about the mysterious hole that had caused the accident. The widow admitted that hunters had discovered human remains and rather than alerting the authorities, she and her late husband just…reburied the bones. The out-of-sight –out-of-mind approach is never a smart option, particularly when it’s oh…illegal, and especially now that the bones in the hole have vanished.

Who was buried there? And how long ago?

Local, state and tribal authorities want answers. My overworked former boss at the Bear Butte County Sheriff’s office hires our PI agency to separate facts from speculation. I bury myself in the investigation because it leaves me little time to obsess about the screwed-up situation in my personal life—why Martinez asked me to go undercover in his strip club as a bartender…and why in the hell I agreed.

I never imagined this new case would cause total chaos in my world, creating new enemies, opening old wounds with my father, reviving disputes with my half-brother’s Lakota family, and generating dangerous employee rivalries.

But the information I uncover leads me back to my brother’s unsolved murder…and I finally come face to face with his killer.