New Mexico Undersheriff Bill Gastner is presented with a case that appears to have brought big time crime, including drug gangs, to the country.

Bill Gastner, the reluctant sheriff of Posadas County, New Mexico, anticipates his last few days in office will be uneventful. That is, until local teen Matt Baca drives drunkenly into the back of Gastner's cruiser, then flees into the night. His eventual capture turns tragic when the boy becomes irrationally violent and takes a fatal tumble into oncoming traffic. Adding to the tragedy, Matt's father is found dead in his tiny kitchen.

It's Christmas in Posadas County. Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman is settling down to a quiet evening with her family until her doctor husband receives a call from the retired chief-of-police, Eduardo, who is at a nearby hotel having pains. Estelle then receives a call that the retired man had an exchange with two men and then collapsed. The men took off in Eduardo's car. An out-of-town couple, the woman on the verge of giving birth, were the only...

After a teen is injured by a rattlesnake fang and his brother is supposedly killed in an ATV accident, Posadas undersheriff Estelle Guzman must look into what the dead boy found--and what it has to do with a five-year-old murder--before he wound up dead.

The Posadas High School girls' volleyball team is on a hot winning streak, exciting everyone. But then coach Clint Scott is found gunned down in the girls' shower room, the victim of four bullets, one fired nearly point blank into his heart. Dead for hours, he was killed soon after the end of last night's game. And, last night, a homegrown Banksy tagged several sites in town before he apparently began work on a section of wall outside the girls' locker...

In Steven Havill's twenty-third Posadas County Mystery, family dynamics play a huge role as Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman and the whole department work to pull the right threads out of a tangle of seemingly small lies. It makes for a mix of the mundane with the harrowing. And justice for all will prove elusive.