This novel follows native Nevadan Jack Ross, a private investigator who has about had it with murder and betrayal and is teetering on the edge of emotional collapse. But when called upon by a friend to help a young prostitute locate her grandfather, missing these forty years, he hits the cold trail…again. Lawrence Parker vanished after killing a man, and Ross’s search for him leads into the big silence of the desert, taking him through the alleys and backstreets of Reno to the doorstep of one of Nevada’s most influential families. The flicker of changing identities, the shadow of blackmail, and the threat of sudden violence tail the private eye as he traces a tangle of family ties to the big silence at its center. An eclectic mix of characters and twisting plot will keep you guessing until the last page.

Reno private investigator Jack Ross has been in the desert for six months when his respite is interrupted by television reporter Miranda Santee. She need's Jack help to solve a story. Miranda has an old photograph of two Las Vegas showgirls who allegedly robbed a mobster of one million dollars thirty years earlier. One of the women is dead, the other missing. Only one piece of the story can pull Ross out of the desert—the dead showgirl was his mother. Now, the man who always believed his mother’s death was an accident must find out if she was murdered.

In this third Jack Ross mystery, the Reno private eye is hired by iris-eyed Patsy McLeod to resume a case abandoned as hopeless eighteen years earlier—the search for her missing teenage daughter Heather. This time, Ross’s investigation leads him from a failed ranch in the desert north of Reno to Sacramento’s porno film industry, from the Lake Tahoe homes of the wealthy and powerful to the cramped offices of Berkeley’s activist community. On the way, he uncovers layers of deception, greed, corruption, sorrow—and murder. Ross also encounters Martha Reedy, a Berkeley-based P.I. who is as dogged about finding Heather as Ross, but for different reasons. Both are used to working solo but find their paths hopelessly intertwined. The Iris Deception offers an irresistibly engaging story set against the implacable beauty of the desert and the booming urban sprawl of contemporary Reno, populated by arresting characters as unique to the Nevada scene as they are universally, fallibly human. Western Literature Series.