A cop lies dying beneath the blistering Arizona sun--a local lawman who may well have become the next sheriff of Cochise County.?The police brass claim that Andy Brady was dirty, and that his shooting was a suicide attempt. Joanna Brady, his devoted wife and mother of their nine-year-old daughter, knows a cover-up when she hears one . . . and murder when she sees it. But her determined efforts to hunt down an assassin and clear her husbands name are placing Joanna and her surviving family in harms way--because in the desert, the one thing more lethal than a rattlers bite . . . is the truth.