Dagny Taggart Jamison is a private investigator born on the day that Neil Armstrong took one small step for a man. Thirty years later, Dagny is taking small steps to regain her self-esteem, damaged by breast cancer and a lover's rejection. She is working for her brother's P.I. firm in Santa Barbara, California, where she meets Lucy Navarro.
Lucy is a graduate student in anthropology who studies the Churok Native American culture. She came home to find her roommate and best friend, Judy Raskin, hanging from the light fixture in her bedroom. Judy's professor had rejected her doctoral dissertation that day, and everybody thought her death was a suicide. But Lucy is sure it was murder.
In the morgue where Judy's body awaits a post mortem examination, Dagny meets Dr. Charles Cranston Clarke, a forensic pathologist. He finds irregularities on the corpse during the autopsy, but none sufficient to change the official verdict of suicide.
Dagny, however, is suspicious enough to take the case, and beside that, wants an excuse to stay in touch with. Clarke, who has reignited long dormant romantic feelings within her. Hot on the trail of Judy's ex-boyfriend, who has fled, Dagny and Lucy find him hanged in a lonely dell in the redwood forest that surrounds the University of California at Santa Cruz. Again, suicide appears to be the plausible explanation.
Dagny's dogged investigation reveals that the two dead students had entered into a partnership with two cultists and a high-ranking Churok Indian shaman to reopen a defunct gold mine on the Churok Indian reservation. Now armed with a motive for murder, Dagny presses ahead. Ultimately, with Charles's help, Dagny will penetrate the heart of perfidy, murder, exploitation, and a contemptible collusion between academe and industry.
BOSON BOOKS also offers Where Evil Lurks by Robert Rodman. For an author bio, photo and a sample read visit bosonbooks.com.
