SHE WAS SMOOTH AND PALE AND BEAUTIFUL AND AS UNASHAMEDLY NAKED AS THE DAY SHE WAS BORN

Brianna “Bree” O’Brien never returned from Skeleton Canyon. Someone brutally murdered the pretty, popular teenager who had stolen away under cover of darkness to rendezvous with her boyfriend, Ignacio Ybarra. Perhaps youthful rage, jealousy and savage passion cost young Bree her life. Or maybe she stumbled onto something too dangerous to know.

Sheriff Joanna Brady of Cochise County knows only too well the pain of losing a loved one to violence. But she is disturbed by the O’Briens’ blind insistence that Ignacio is responsible for their daughter’s slaying. Joanna senses there are words not being spoken, and dark mysteries locked behind doors of the sprawling O’Brien family compound. But it is the strange disappearance of a good friend that is pulling Sheriff Brady ever closer to the lethal nest of lies, greed and secrets hiding in a desolate corner of the Arizona desert - where the next blood that feeds the parched, cracked earth could be her own.

In the early Sixties one of my sisters owned a small ranch near Bisbee Junction. On this ranch, ee-yi-ee-yi-o, there was a horse named Warpaint, a cow named Shirley, a pig with no name, and a three-legged Australian shepherd named Smokey Joe. Warpaint was smart for a horse. Whenever it rained, he knew that the electric fence would stop working, and he’d let everybody out. Smokey Joe could be counted on to help round up Shirley and the pig, but once Warpaint was out in the pasture, he stayed just out of reach. You could walk up to him and touch him as long as you had nothing in your hand that resembled a bridle or a rope.

One day, when Warpaint was loose, my sister approached him with nothing in her hand. He let her walk right up to him. Then, while she snuggled under his neck, she whipped her bra out from under her T-shirt, wrapped it around his neck, and led him home. Poor Warpaint. The world shifted on its axis, and he was never certain of anything again.

Almost forty years passed between then and the time I started writing Skeleton Canyon. I can’t explain to you how my sister’s use of a bra back then evolved into Joanna Brady’s use of hers in this book. All I can say is, the story went into my head one way and leaked out through my fingers and into my computer in another form.

JAJ