Navajo paralegal Naomi Manymules pauses on a lakeside cliff for a moonlit moment and hears a swimmer far below. When loud echoes shatter the quiet, she heads for home. The next day, her lifelong friend is a prime murder suspect whose sleazy, abusive husband has turned up naked and dead in on the lake. Her friend offers only a coyote as her alibi, and the police aren't inclined to look much further. With wicked humor and a big helping of snark, Naomi and her boss navigate through a colorful assortment of petty criminals, surly teenagers, prominent locals, likable polygamists, and a big-city mobster or two. It's only a matter of time before they become targets themselves.

Meet the sleuths:

Divorced, thirty-something, mom of two, Naomi Manymules bluffs her way into a new paralegal career. She's smart and feisty and knows just about everything that goes on in Sage Landing, so she is the perfect person to nudge a reluctant attorney into getting serious about practicing law.

Grant Carson is a cynical, handsomely scruffy ex-prosecutor who has escaped to a remote lakeside town. Until Naomi decided he would do otherwise, he was practicing just enough law to support the real passion of his life: his old yacht, the Deep Inn.

Picture the upper Grand Canyon and its many side canyons. Fill it with blue water, and that's what the remote lake next to Sage Landing looks like. The town itself is small and compact, perched on a red sandstone mesa between a mighty dam and the Navajo Nation. It's a unique place that brings out whatever's unique about everyone who shows up there.

It all adds up to a quirky, laugh-out-loud small-town mystery with suspense, sass, and suspects aplenty.