The hero of Tularosa returns in a compelling mystery of family secrets played outagainst the breathtaking Gila Wilderness of southwestern New Mexico. Kevin Kerney, the ex-Santa Fe chief of detectives who made his exciting debut in Tularosa, is working as a seasonal forest ranger and banking his pay toward a small ranch. Despite the county militia's planting pipe bombs on hiking trails, Kerney looks forward to a quiet summer in the high mountains. But the poaching of wildlife, the murder of a Mexican tourist, and the discovery of a disoriented old man in the wilderness thrust Kerney into an investigation that accelerates dangerously to a heart-stopping final confrontation. Kerney hooks up with Jim Stiles, a young game and fish officer, to track the poacher who may also be a murderer. Their investigation leads again and again to two land-rich brothers, Edgar and Eugene Cox, who are locked in a sixty-year-old feud. Even the locals don't know how it started, and the two men aren't talking. Kerney's effort to unravel the web of secrecy around the Cox brothers is complicated by Edgar's daughter, Karen Cox, the assistant district attorney. Kerney hopes that she wants justice done, but she clearly fears what the truth may do to her father. And as Kerney puts the puzzle together a piece at a time, someone the poacher, the murderer, or the local militia keeps trying to kill him.