When the mayor's mother is murdered, it is up to Sheriff Joanna Brady to find the killer.

As a militia movement invades Arizona's Cochise County, a gun dealer dies mysteriously, and his stock of high-powered weapons vanishes, Sheriff Joanna Brady investigates two other murders that point to armed separatist Alton Hosfield, a probe that threatens her own life and those of her family.

This time Sheriff Joanna Brady may expect to see her maternity leave through to completion, but the world has other plans when a serial homicide case surfaces in her beloved Cochise County. Rather than staying home with her newborn and losing herself in the cold cases to be found in her father's long unread diaries, Joanna instead finds herself overseeing a complex investigation involving multiple jurisdictions.

Joanna Brady--devoted mother, new wife, harried Arizona sheriff is attending a law-enforcement conference and dealing over the telephone with various departmental troubles. One call, however, sends her home in a hurry. Her daughter, Jenny, along with another young girl, Dora Matthews, have stumbled over a dead body in the woods during a Girl Scout camping trip. A few days later, Dora turns up dead as well.

Cochise County sheriff Joanna Brady reluctantly joins forces with J.P. Beaumont, a member of Washington State's Special Homicide Investigation team, when a promising African-American artist, supposedly under the protection of the government, is murdered shortly after moving to Bisbee, Arizona

As if juggling a family, including the impending birth of a second child, a career and a staff shortage at the Sheriff's office aren't enough, Sheriff Joanna Brady has to deal with two serious crimes. The first is the dead body of an ex-con who was found in the desert with all his fingers severed. The second is the brutal attack of one of her officers while on unauthorized stakeout. Being a sheriff is what she is and Joanna will stop at nothing to...

On a beautiful sunny day in the Coronado National Monument, an elderly couple's car goes off the side of a mountain and into oblivion. The terrain is so rocky that a helicopter must be flown in to retrieve the bodies, and to make matters worse, a thunder-storm is looming on the horizon. Hours later and miles away, the subsiding rain reveals gruesome evidence: two trash bags containing human remains. It's just another day in the life of Cochise County...