K.C. Fontero left New Mexico in the wake of a bitter break-up to take an academic fellowship in Texas. With a doctorate in sociology and expertise in white supremacist groups, she's on her way to an academic career. But a plea for help from her ex, Melissa, brings K.C. back to Albuquerque to find Melissa's troubled younger sister. Megan has disappeared with her white supremacist boyfriend and K.C. knows she has the expertise to track the mysterious group, and she knows she'll be doing a public service to uncover it. What she doesn't know is how far into her past she'll have to go to find both Megan and herself and the deeper she digs into the group, the greater the danger she faces.

The body of a young gay man buried along the Rio Grande leads Albuquerque police detective Chris Gutiérrez down a path of dark secrets and old hatreds. Trying to deal with the other detective assigned to the case-the sexist and homophobic Dale Harper-Chris tracks the killer to an older unsolved case, and to the doors of a local megachurch and a popular minister with ties to ex-gay groups. Enlisting the research skills and networks of sociologist and best friend K.C. Fontero, Chris works to build the case and make an arrest before the killer strikes again, even as she must also face her growing feelings for attorney Dayna Carson. Struggling with her attraction to Dayna and the complexity of a difficult case, Chris is drawn into an ominous and potentially deadly game of cat-and-mouse with a man who might kill to protect his own secrets.

When the Albuquerque paper reports that an unidentified white man was found dead along a remote stretch of road on the Navajo Reservation in northwestern New Mexico, UNM sociology professor K.C. Fontero thinks she might be able to use the case as an example of culture and jurisdiction in one of her classes. But it's soon apparent that this dead man might have something to do with a mysterious letter that River Crandall, brother of K.C.'s partner Sage, recently received from the siblings' estranged father, Bill. What does the letter and Bill's link to a natural gas drilling company have to do with the dead man? And why would Bill try to contact his son and daughter now, after a decade of silence? From the streets of Albuquerque to the vast expanse of the Navajo Reservation, K.C. and Sage try to unravel the secrets of a dead man while Sage confronts a past she thought she'd left behind. But someone or something wants to keep those secrets buried, and as K.C. soon discovers, sometimes beliefs of one culture jump the boundaries of another, threatening to drive a wedge into the relationship she's building with Sage.