When the murdered body of a young woman is found in a river wash in Black Canyon City, Arizona, Deputy Sheriff Sam Rush begins an investigation that leads deeper and deeper into the mystery of her death and the psychological mystery of identity. Nate Aspenall, with whom the young woman had been involved, is forced to confront the facts of her life and his own, and what he may have become with her. Sam Rush confronts the degree to which he is hindered by his assumptions about the Aspenall family, and by the knowledge of his own isolation. And Travis Aspenall, Nate's fourteen-year-old stepbrother, must come to grips with what love and sex do to people, what choices they make when threatened with loss, and how to figure out what you're left with when what you thought you knew and trusted has been thrown into question. As the investigation takes Sam north to Winslow and Holbrook and brings Nate home, temporarily, to Black Canyon City, solving the mystery becomes more...

A decent, ordinary life jeopardized by a catastrophically extraordinary event: this is the story, mythic in its outline and substance, that Judy Troy--author of two New York Times Notable Books and Whiting award winner--tells in From the Black Hills. In Wheatley, South Dakota, during the summer before Mike Newlin is to begin college, his father, an insurance salesman, shoots and kills the young woman who works for him as his receptionist. He disappears, and Mike is left behind in shock and grief. With his future suddenly obscured, Mike finds himself nearly overwhelmed by his present circumstances--not only the emotional damage inflicted by his father's awful crime but also his mother's dismay, the insinuating methods of a criminal investigator named Tom DeWitt, his girlfriend's anxieties, and his longing for an older woman who lives nearby--and the question of whether he will ever see his father again and what will happen if he does. As...