The riveting first novel in the thrilling series featuring wildlife ranger Nick Drake from award-winning author Dwight Holing.In the unforgiving silence of the high desert, a killer is turning gullies into graves. Nick Drake returned from Vietnam with a boxful of medals and a duffle bag packed with demons. Trained to kill but left to find his own way back into society, he flees to the High Lonesome of Eastern Oregon in search of a hard-won peace. As a wildlife ranger patrolling the vast, isolated refuges there, he expects his biggest conflicts to be stray cattle and low-level poachers. Then he finds the body. Deep in a sunbaked gully, a young girl has been ritually murdered and meticulously placed. The horrific discovery shatters Nick's illusion of sanctuary, plunging him back into humanity's heart of darkness. To stop a calculating killer from turning the desert gullies into a graveyard, Nick must weaponize the very instincts he's trying to escape. But in a pitiless territory where the heat sears and the silence judges, tracking a predator means confronting the darkness within himself. What readers are saying: "Smart, thrilling, beautifully written page-turners. A stunning love song to a remote land." "Prose that crackles like the unforgiving setting, building to a climax as powerful as a force of nature." "A masterful blend of high desert realism and deep respect for Native American culture, lore, and mysticism." "The storylines are absolutely riveting, keeping me up turning pages late into the night." "Nick Drake is wonderfully complex, gritty, and straight to the heart. A man to run the river of life with!"