Twenty years ago, a darkness descended upon the Walkers of Tucson, Arizona….

…an Anglo family with solid ties to the legends and history of the Tohono O’Odham Indian nation. A personified evil named Andrew Carlisle–a psychopath in the guise of a nondescript college professor–brought blood and terror into their world, stalking, attacking, and nearly murdering Diana Ladd Walker and her young son, Davy.

But Diana fought back, blinding and crippling her assailant. In later years, in an uneasy collaboration with her would-be killer, she wrote a book about the horrific events that nearly destroyed her and her loved ones–a book that made Diana Walker famous. And when Carlisle died in prison, the Walkers believed their long nightmare was finally over; the monster would never be able to harm them again.

They were wrong.

When Kiss of the Bees starts, twenty years have passed since the end of Hour of the Hunter. Diana Ladd who desperately wanted to be a writer back then has just been awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Her son, Davy, has grown up and has just graduated from law school. Her husband, a struggling detective in Hour of the Hunter, has spent years as the sheriff of Pima County, but he has recently lost a bid for reelection. And the crazed killer from back then is dead and out of the picture, right? Wrong!

When it came time to write the sequel to Hour of the Hunter I knew only one piece of the puzzle. Twenty-five years earlier, when I was a school librarian on the reservation, a young girl, a toddler who had been abandoned by her birth parents, almost died of being stung by ants because her elderly caretaker was deaf as a post and didn’t hear the child screaming. This harrowing tale, one that stuck in my heart and wouldn’t go away, was the only story I was determined to use in the upcoming book, one that still didn’t have a name the night before I was set to start writing it.

I went to the bedroom, worrying about whether or not I’d be able to summon the same kind of magic that had sustained me while I was writing Hour of the Hunter. I went to the bookshelf and took down a copy of Harold Bell Wright’s Long Ago Told, where I had found the legends that had been woven into the background of my first thriller.

Getting into bed, I allowed the book to fall open. I found myself reading a legend about a woman who, in a time of terrible drought, was saved from death by the beating of the wings of a huge swarm of bees. When the drought was over and the woman was still alive, she went on to become the Tohono O’Odham’s greatest medicine woman. As soon as I read that story, I leaped out of bed and went to tell my husband, “The magic’s back. Now I can write this book.” Not only was the magic back, it had given me my title, Kiss of the Bees.

JAJ