Alice Rogers, an seniors widow, is dead, present murdered in the Arizona desert. It’s easy enough to pin the killing on the teenagers caught traveling her car across the Mexican border, but Sheriff Brady isn’t going to ignore it at that. Alice was something of a free of charge spirit, having a penchant for Scotch, the glitter of NEVADA, and a romance with a man twenty years her junior. Her hot-tempered daughter Susan suspects Mom’s boyfriend-her former handyman who moved in instead of moving on when he finished about Outlaw Hill his handy work. Now Susan’s furious at her sibling Clete, the do-nothing mayor of Tombstone, blaming him for not really safeguarding their inheritance by breaking up their mother’s wintertime romance.

Yet all is not as it appears to be, and Joanna is certainly forced to put her personal existence on hold to drill down deeper into Alice’s death, the lives of her greedy offspring, as well as the identification of her inexplicable gentleman friend. And as the investigation gets sidetracked by ugly local land disputes, it requires some troublesome twists and changes, until Sheriff Brady discovers herself wading through a murky morass of graft and problem that may possess given someone reason to kill-and kill again.