Father Mark Townsend

A lawyer with questionable ethics lies dead in a Seattle convention center. He was brutally slain by a ceremonial knife from a village a thousand miles to the north. Father Mark Townsend recognizes the deadly artifact...and knows the Eskimo tribe that carved the intricate pictures on its ivory handle.

A legacy of lies and bloodshed. Beneath the serene surface of LaConner, Washington - a popular and picturesque small town on the Northwest's Puget Sound - trouble is brewing between the local and Native American communities: a growing storm of suspicion and violence incited by long-standing prejudice...and recent murder. As he does every week, Jesuit priest Father Mark Townsend has come to LaConner to visit his grandparents during the annual Tulip Festival in the Skagit Valley. But this time a corpse awaits him - the body of his grandfather's best friend, Dutch Olsen, a man well known for his hatred of Swinomish Indian fishing practices, and for his passion for illegal treasure-hunting on tribal lands. Now father Townsend is caught in the middle of a volatile conflict involving stolen artifacts and vanishing salmon crops. And it's up to him to solve a mystery that could mark his grandfather as a murderer...and bring deadly crimes of the past to life again.

Father Mark Townsend is mystified by evidence that St. Joseph parish has an unknown visitor hiding in the church each night. Believing that it could be one of Seattle's homeless youth in need of help, the priest leaves a brief note along with a $20 bill, urging whomever it is to come and see him. To his surprise, it's the police who pay him a visit. The dead body of a fourteen-year-old boy has been found in the park, badly bruised and violated, with Father Mark's incriminating note and $20 bill in his pocket. The police want to know about Mark's relationship with the boy, a runaway originally from a small Alaskan village whose family now lives in Carnation, Washington. The priest is stunned, yet concern for the boy's family, as well as his own reputation demands that he look for answers. But his investigation becomes entangled with the rest of his pastoral duties, causing a storm of disapproval and suspicion among parish leaders. Now the only way this busy Jesuit can calm the troubled waters and clear his name is to find the real killer... before he strikes again.

When the journalist Angelina Sandoval Ybarra writes a story about the mysterious end-of-the-world preacher Brother Gabriel, Father Mark Townsend loses no time in heading to Yakima Valley where the faithful are gathering.