The intense desert heat has brought a nightmare to a small corner of the Southwest. A body lies lifeless in an airless trailer, surrounded by seventeen others. It is a crime unspeakable in conception and execution-a horror strangely connected to a grisly slaughter in a neighboring state, where the corpses of two women are found gruesomely posed on a rancher's land. A day that started out hot has already turned blistering for Joanna Brady, the sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona, for terror has moved into her small town to stay.