Showing Desert Shadows by Betty Webb

“Say what you will about serial killers, some of them can really write.”

Some books have money written all over them. Not just books by authors like the Death Row inmate at the Arizona State prison complex, but books like Recreational Explosives and How to Build Them. Or Finding Your Patriot Ancestors Through DNA Testing. Or Losing America. Yes, Patriot’s Blood has gone racist, its list making money from books that play into the worst elements of society and its darkest behaviors.

It’s no surprise there are plenty of suspects when Patriot’s Blood publisher Gloriana Alden-Taylor is poisoned at the annual Southwestern Book Publishers Expo (SOBOP). But the hammer falls on just one: Owen Sisiwan, a Pima Indian. Scottsdale PI Lena Jones enlists in Owen’s defense.
To her horror, Lena finds herself rubbing elbows not just with greedy Gloriana’s family and employees, but with disgruntled authors and extremists of all sorts. Like that serial killer—he had been dying to get published by Patriot’s Blood.

What changed his mind?

While working the case, Lena, a survivor of a childhood spent in foster care, is further pained by her sessions with a therapist for anger management. Soon her flashbacks to the time just before her mother shot her four-year-old self accelerate and move her closer to the mystery of her own identity.