When female lawyer Neil Hamel agrees to defend an elderly woman accused of murder, she's eager to have a crack at a homicide case. The Albuquerque police say that Martha Conover murdered the young woman who accidentally killed her grandson three years prior. For Neil, investigating the case raise...
On one side of the border, a murder; on the other, a killer. In between stands Neil Hamel, a woman with a passion for the truth. Don't worry, Chiquita was the Kid's answer to almost everything, and right now Neil Hamel misses the Kid -- her part-time lover and car mechanic. Neil had gone to Mexic...
This is the third in the series of Claire Reynier mysteries. It starts with the apparent death of an old sorority sister of Claire’s in Santa Fe. As the story develops, it turns out that Evelyn, the old friend, had visited four of her old “sisters” in turn, spinning them stories and stealing thei...
From the acclaimed author of Confidence Woman...a secret of the Spanish Inquisition is uncovered-and its murderous wrath unleashed-in the modern American Southwest.
At ten her coworker Ruth O’Connor stopped by to ask what she was doing for lunch. “I’m going to Santa Fe,” Claire replied. “Oh?” asked Ruth, cocking her head. Ruth had an inquisitive nature and Claire knew she wouldn’t be satisfied until she found out exactly why she was going to Santa Fe. “I hav...
said Terrance Lewellen. “No bird in the world is worth more than a hundred.” It was Friday evening, but we were still in our respective offices talking on our respective-but-disparate phones. Mine doesn’t have a visual image, but the thought occurred to me that Terrance’s might, and it provoked a...
If I got in my car and drove over the mountain I could be at Nancy’s house in Cedar Crest in an hour. I was having trouble getting back in the office groove anyway. I could have called Nancy and told her I was coming, but I didn’t. Eric had already said she’d be home. “I’m kind of tired. I think ...
I had to go through the electronic gate and three doors before I was able see my client. Some juvenile offenders consider this place a dungeon, others a sanctuary; it depends on where and what they’re coming from. The Four O’s were bound to have members inside, and I was worried about what they m...
The UNM campus was full of sculptures, some more successful artistically than others. Claire liked the circle of stone obelisks created by a Korean artist in front of the Earth and Planetary Sciences Building where Lawton Davis worked. She knew him by reputation only as a prominent scholar in the...
One of Claire Reynier’s jobs at the Center for Southwest Research at the University of New Mexico was to preserve the papers, the legend, and the memory of the writer Jonathan Vail. There was little in his own words—a few letters, a novel, and a journal that had remained in print for more than th...