"A richly imagined and terrifically realized novel...it rings as true as the winter light across the southern desert." –James Crumley

Circling buzzards lead U.S. Border Patrol agent Dolph Martinez to the corpse of a man executed in the desert...a murder that shatters the fragile calm in a dusty, Texas town. His investigation pits him against the Mexican Army, the DEA, big-money Houston real estate interests, a Catholic nun who practices voodoo, a charismatic revolutionary wanted on both sides of the border, and perhaps deadliest of all, the demons from his own, tortured past.

"Grit and grace in the face of troubling ambiguities in a moral borderland." –Publishers Weekly

"Sanderson makes the gritty, thankless landscape of the border come alive, from the relentless heat to the failed hopes." –The Washington Post

"Lean and lyrical." –The New York Times

"Sanderson is especially good at contrasting the clarity and austere natural beauty of the Chihuahuan desert with the murky, Orson Welles aura that envelopes human society there." –Dallas Morning News