Mo Bowdre and his Anglo-Hopi girlfriend, Connie Barnes, find themselves at a remote desert research station in the bootheel of New Mexico thirty miles from the Mexican border and three hundred miles from nowhere. It's an unlikely site for Bowdre's newest sculpture commission -- not to mention conspiracy, sexual deception, smuggling, and murder. When a female corpse turns up in Skeleton Canyon, the research station is plunged into turmoil. Bowdre, with his sixth sense for trouble, goes into action when it is discovered that the murdered woman was a scientist and an FBI special agent. But the murder is only the first sharp thorn in a dense thicket of mystery.