Emmett Parker and Anna Turnipseed

If there's one thing that Bureau of Indian Affairs Investigator Emmett Quanah Parker knows, it's that the dead don't always stay dead. When the corpse of a woman, brutally murdered and bizarrely mutilated, is discovered on Havasupai Nation land, Parker is paired with FBI Special Agent Anna Turnipseed in a hastily assembled task force of two. The two share a mixed Native American ancestry—and little else. As they are pulled deeper into a complex case, Parker suspects they are being led, like Custer to a Little Bighorn, into a killer's trap.

In the tradition of Tony Hillerman and Joseph Wambaugh comes this suspense thriller reuniting Bureau of Indian Affairs Criminal Investigator Emmett Quanah Parker and FBI Special Agent Anna Turnipseed, two Native American cops torn between their heritage and the law. A fire-gutted police cruiser found in a remote part of the Navajo reservation bears witness to a horrific crime. Inside are the bodies of a tribal patrolman and his wife. As BIA Investigator Emmett Parker and FBI Special Agent Anna Turnipseed know, a cop's murder is never simple, raising countless questions and suspicions. When another murder is discovered, the case explodes into an otherworldly realm. Both Parker, a Comanche, and Turnipseed, a Modoc, are well acquainted with the eerie shadow land between native myth and modern homicide investigation. Now they will have to touch minds with a murderer who has woven personal madness with Navajo myth to create his own reality—and with it the need to kill and kill again.

Though there are signs of foul play, BIA investigator Emmett Quanah Parker and FBI special agent Anna Turnipseed aren't looking for a killer—the remains dug out of a riverbank by an illegal fossil hunter are 14,000 years old. Parker and Turnipseed are sent to Central Oregon as official witnesses to the examination of John Day Man, as he is dubbed, for the bones have quickly provoked a controversy that threatens to erupt into violence: the skeleton is not Native American but distinctly Caucasian, shattering long-held tenets concerning who the first inhabitants of this continent were. Emmett, with his Comanche and white ancestry, and Anna, a reservation-born Modoc with Asian blood, share a sensitivity to both parties' concerns—and a forbidden attraction that's causing them professional and personal problems. They've broken the unwritten law that partners should never get emotionally involved. Having crossed that line, Emmett and Anna are too distracted by each other to see the escalating suspicion and fear around them when a young tribal anthropologist is swallowed by the misty night and within hours of her disappearance the fossil hunter who discovered the skeleton is found disemboweled. The Warm Springs Indians insist that the unburied bones of the Ancient One have been turned into a skep, a murderous spirit that haunts the darkness. As winter closes in on the steppes of the Colombia Plateau, accusations of ritualized murder fly between the Indian and white communities—and the fight turns deadly when a second skeleton is unearthed. In the midst of the turmoil, Emmett and Anna are paralyzed by their own demons. This estrangement could prove deadly if they stop watching each other's back long enough for a killer to target them too. And at the center of it all are the Ancient Ones, exacting a terrible price as the dark path to resolution runs a gauntlet through the boneyards of prehistory.

FBI Agent Anna Turnipseed, a Modoc Indian from California, and Bureau of Indian Affairs Investigator Emmett Parker, a Comanche from Oklahoma, are a team, sent by the Feds wherever there are problems in tribal territory. This assignment takes them to upstate New York where an elder of the Oneida tribe was found dead, every major bone in her body shattered. Their investigation puts them in the middle of a race war, and soon their lives depend on their instincts and ability to see the dividing line between myth and reality.

Badly wounded and estranged from his partner and love interest, Anna Turnipseed, Emmett Parker has come home. After thirteen years of federal law enforcement assignments that took him to every Indian nation but his own, the veteran investigator for the Bureau of Indian Affairs has finally arrived in Oklahoma on convalescent leave. At once a son of the Nuhmuhnuh (“the People,” as the Comanche call themselves) and a government investigator, he has ties to both sides—and is about to discover which side pulls harder. On the reservation, Emmett finds an intricate web of familial and tribal duties—and what could become a massive class action suit. Indian plaintiffs are suing the BIA for oil well funds they never received. Drawn into the controversy, Emmett is accused of murder by an investigator of his own blood, and now, the man who used to be the law is running from it.