Saguaro Sanction

Scott Graham

Description

• Galleys available - in print and on Edelweiss
• Co–op available
• Extensive social media campaign
• Publicize to regional newspapers, magazines, and radio
• Targeted outreach to mystery publications such as Mystery Readers Journal and Reviewing the Evidence
• Promotion through scottfranklingraham.com
• Regional Southwest tour and virtual events; publicity and promotion in conjunction with author events
• Electronic postcard sent to publisher contact list announcing publication and relevant reviews

• New National Park Mystery: Book 8 in Scott Graham's National Park Mystery Series introduces readers to the landscapes and cultural histories of Saguaro National Park in southern Arizona.
• Insider look at a national park: Offers readers an inside look at the wonders of a wildly popular national park and the complexities of archaeological preservation and protection.
• Praise: Author has received endorsements from such mystery–fan favorites as C. J. Box, William Kent Kreuger and Anne Hillerman.
• Promotion and partnership: Author is well–connected in the mystery community and has had great success with bookstore events for previous books in the series; we will coordinate virtual and in–person multi–author events partnering with environmental nonprofits and bookstores.
• Regional appeal in the Southwest.

Janelle Ortega and Chuck Bender are drawn deep into a threatening web of hostility and deceit in Saguaro National Park in this page-turner of a mystery.

"A winning blend of archaeology and intrigue, Graham's series turns our national parks into places of equal parts beauty, mystery, and danger.”
—EMILY LITTLEJOHN, author of Lost Lake

When Janelle Ortega’s cousin from Mexico is found brutally murdered at a remote petroglyph site in Saguaro National Park, she and her husband, archaeologist Chuck Bender, are drawn deep into a threatening web of hostility and deceit stretching south across the US-Mexico border and back in time a thousand years, to when the Hohokam people thrived in the Sonoran Desert.

Book 8 in Scott Graham's National Park Mystery Series introduces readers to the landscapes and cultural histories of Saguaro National Park in southern Arizona, providing an inside look at the wonders of the wildly popular national park and its archaeological and cultural complexities.

Sujets

• Amateur Sleuth
• Detective
• Mystery
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Torrey House Press
• Date de parution: 07 mars 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781948814768
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Praise for the National Park Mystery Series
“An exciting, rewarding puzzle.”
— PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“As always, the highlight of Graham’s National Park Mystery Series is his extensive knowledge of the parks system, its lands, and its people.”
— KIRKUS REVIEWS
“Intriguing … Graham has a true talent for describing the Rockies’ flora and fauna, allowing his readers to feel almost as if they were trekking the park themselves.”
— MYSTERY SCENE MAGAZINE
“Graham has crafted a multilevel mystery that plumbs the emotions of greed and jealousy.”
— DURANGO HERALD
“Graham has created a beautifully balanced book, incorporating intense action scenes, depth of characterization, realistic landscapes, and historical perspective.”
— REVIEWING THE EVIDENCE
“Only a truly gifted novelist is able to keep a reader turning pages while imparting extensive knowledge about the people, the landscape, and the park system. Scott Graham proves yet again that he is one of the finest.”
—CHRISTINE CARBO, author of A Sharp Solitude: A Glacier Mystery
“A winning blend of archaeology and intrigue, Graham’s series turns our national parks into places of equal parts beauty, mystery, and danger.”
—EMILY LITTLEJOHN, author of Shatter the Night: A Detective Gemma Monroe Mystery
Also by Scott Graham in the National Park Mystery Series
Canyon Sacrifice
Mountain Rampage
Yellowstone Standoff
Yosemite Fall
Arches Enemy
Mesa Verde Victim
Canyonlands Carnage
SAGUARO SANCTION
A National Park Mystery
By Scott Graham
TORREY HOUSE PRESS
Salt Lake City • Torrey
This is a work of fiction set in a real place. All characters in this novel are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First Torrey House Press Edition, March 2023
Copyright © 2023 by Scott Graham
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publisher.
Published by Torrey House Press
Salt Lake City, Utah
www.torreyhouse.org
International Standard Book Number: 978-1-948814-75-1
E-book ISBN: 978-1-948814-76-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021952965
Cover art by David Jonason
Cover design by Kathleen Metcalf
Interior design by Rachel Leigh Buck-Cockayne
Distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
Torrey House Press offices in Salt Lake City sit on the homelands of Ute, Goshute, Shoshone, and Paiute nations. Offices in Torrey are on homelands of Southern Paiute, Ute, and Navajo nations.
ABOUT THE COVER
“Saguaro National Park is one of my favorite spots in Arizona for camping and inspiration. I always have a feeling of deep peace when walking among the stately, silent saguaros. To me, this is the real Garden of Eden.”
Acclaimed Southwest landscape artist David Jonason painted Saguaro Storm, a portion of which appears on the cover of Saguaro Sanction. Combining a keenly observant eye and inspiration drawn from a number of twentieth-century art movements, including cubism, futurism, precisionism, and art deco, Jonason achieves a uniquely personal vision through his vividly dreamlike oil paintings of the American Southwest. Jonason connects on canvas the traditional arts and crafts of the Southwest’s Native tribes with the intricate patterns in nature known as fractals. “For me as a painter,” he says, “it’s a reductive and simplifying process of finding the natural geometries in nature, just as Navajo weavers and Pueblo potters portray the natural world through geometric series of zigzags, curves, and other patterns.”
Saguaro Storm (36×24 inches, oil on canvas, 2018) is used by permission of The Jonason Studio, davidjonason.com.
For my son Logan, with thanks for sharing his extensive knowledge of border issues with me
PROLOGUE
They deserved to die, all three of them.
She had ridden the cresting wave of her excitement all through the night. After months of preparation, tonight, finally, she would meet her goal.
She’d begun the trek not long after midnight, leaving the outskirts of the city and striding into the desert ahead of Javier and Mendes, who grumbled at her command that they not use lights.
Cactus branches reached out from the darkness. She shoved past them, ignoring the thorns piercing her shirtsleeves and embedding themselves in her flesh, while behind her Javier and Mendes yelped and muttered bitter curses in Spanish.
Her schedule had been ambitious from the start. Big ideas required big ambition, after all. Besides, the schedule was determined not by her, but by the calendars. She’d merely tasked herself with meeting their requirements. Now, over the next twenty-four hours, the schedule required her to bring her plan to fruition.
The light evening rain shower had ended by the time she set off into the desert with her two hired hands. As she led them through the night, the clouds gave way to a star-filled sky and the desert exuded its pungent after-precipitation scent, filling her lungs with purpose.
The three young men met her at the rocks as planned. But when they admitted they had not completed their task, claiming exhaustion and the weight of their cargo, her excitement gave way to outrage. Others had completed the journey with similar loads over the past weeks and months. Who did these three think they were, abandoning her final, precious delivery in the desert somewhere to the south?
Fury swelled inside her, a loosed beast demanding retribution. She pressed her fingers to the looped length of razor wire in the front pocket of her pants, the coils warm from the heat of her thigh.
She drew the looped wire from her pocket, slipped her fingers through the steel rings at each end, and stretched the wire taut. The young man who had done the talking did not see her movements in the dark. But when she slipped the wire over his head and cinched it tight around his neck, he felt the full force of her wrath in the slash of the wire through his skin—just as she felt it, too, in the warm spray of his blood across her face.
PART ONE
“This high figure with a duck on its head, brightness rounding into every pecked divot. It looked like it was carrying the sun.”
—Craig Childs, Tracing Time
1
Rosie Ortega inhaled deeply and noisily through her nostrils. “I’ve never smelled anything so good,” the fourteen-year-old declared.
“You sound like a horse,” said Carmelita, Rosie’s sixteen-year-old sister.
“Neeeiiigh!” Rosie whinnied. She shook her head, her curly, black hair bouncing off her round cheeks. “If I was going to be a horse, I’d be a wild horse. Especially around here. The desert smells sooooo delicious.”
Carmelita swept a loose lock of her long, dark hair over her shoulder. “It’d be hard to find something to eat, though, with all the thorns.”
Rosie stopped in the middle of the rocky path she and Carmelita were traversing with their mother, Janelle Ortega, and stepfather, Chuck Bender, along the spine of a ridge in the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona. Chuck and Janelle were dressed for the hike in broad-brimmed sunhats, long-sleeved cotton shirts, and loose pants. The girls sported running tights, stretchy nylon tops, and ball caps. Chuck wore heavy leather hiking boots, while Janelle and the girls wore their favored lightweight trail-running shoes with marshmallowy soles.
Chuck halted behind Janelle and the girls. The boulder-studded ridge snaked ahead of them beneath the blue late-October sky. A quarter mile back, a group of hikers strode along the ridgetop trail in a tight bunch. The hikers included Saguaro National Park Superintendent Ron Blankenship, a park ranger accompanying Ron, and the five-member research team Ron had assembled at Chuck’s request for today’s observational study.
Desert greenery blanketed the slopes dropping steeply away from both sides of the ridge. Hundreds of saguaro cactuses towered like multiarmed power poles above the low mantle of desert foliage, which included prickly pear cactuses with pads the size of dinner plates; barrel cactuses as big around at their midriffs as fire hydrants; and spindly ocotillo, their long, thin gray branches thrust toward the sky. Halfway down the west face of the ridge, a line of brown volcanic cliffs thirty to forty feet high cut through the vegetation, running parallel with the ridgetop.
Chuck sniffed the air. It had rained the evening before, when a low-pressure system had passed through Arizona. With the clouds departed and the morning sun heating the east side of the ridge, the powerful scent of the moist desert filled the air. The scent, sweet and tangy with an undertone of pine, issued from the many creosote bushes dotting the hillside among the cactuses. The pores of the tiny, resin-coated creosote leaves, wide open to absorb last night’s precipitation, emitted the unique smell, as distinctive as any in nature.
Despite the nervousness thrumming in Chuck’s belly about what today would bring, the pleasing odor invigorated him, putting him in mind of the outdoors-oriented life he’d shared with his family since becoming husband to Janelle and stepdad to Carmelita and Rosie six years ago, after far too many years as a lonely bachelor.
Over the course of his two-and-a-half-decade career as an independent archaeologist, it was the scent of the drying Sonoran Desert, even more than the stunning desert scenery itself, that had led Chuck to bid regularly for contracts here in southern Arizona. He drove south from Colorado two or three times each winter to work the bids he won, escaping the snow and cold of the mountains to complete the fieldwork portion of his Arizona contracts. The work trips enabled him to enjoy the warmth and beauty of the low-elevation desert straddling the US-Mexico border. As an added bonus, after infrequent rainstorms like the one yesterday evening, he was treated to the wondrous Sonoran scent as well.
“If you ask me, Rosie,” he said, “there’s no better smell on earth.”
He’d