Bob Reynolds is a newcomer to town who isn’t entirely welcome or on good footing with the sheriff. But he has interests other than drinking and spending his inheritance, including one that goes by the name Tammy Fay Smith and who may have caught the sheriff's eye as well. Reynolds would rather pretend he never saw the body in the creek, but when it disappears, he begins to doubt what little he knew about this secretive town. Try as he might, he just can't forget the body, despite the advice he's given to do so, and despite the evidence to suggest that he might be disappearing himself soon enough.

Rodeo Grace Garnet lives with his old dog in a remote corner of Arizona known to locals as El Hoyo. Retired from the rodeo circuit and scraping by on piecework as a bounty hunter, warrant server and divorce snoop, he doesn’t have much choice but to say yes when hired to solve the murder of an Indian teenager, whose death is part of a mysterious rompecabeza --- a classic crime puzzler --- that includes multiple killings, cold-blooded betrayals and low-down scheming, with Rodeo caught in the middle.