Buried by the Roan

Fracking ruptures more than the earth.

Following the mysterious death of one her clients, who is found frozen on the shore of Oyster Lake with nothing more than a bump on his head, female hunting guide Allison Coil follows the trail of questions into the explosive fight over the future of the Roan Plateau, home to one of the richest deposits of natural gas in the western United States.

Only one slim valley separates Allison's home, the Flat Tops Wilderness, from The Roan Plateau, the site of a real-life environmental dust-up. Allison is a former city girl who left her big-city job after surviving an airplane crash (covered in detail in Allison's first mystery, Antler Dust), She wants nothing more than to protect the natural beauty of the pristine Flat Tops.

The police believe buffalo rancher Josh Keating died of hypothermia. The official explanation is logical, but Allison learns from other hunters that Keating was involved in a nasty feud with neighbor and East Coast transplant Ethan Bostwick, an environmental zealot who is dead set against energy development of The Roan. Keating had filed a lawsuit against Bostwick based on the Old West concept of adverse possession, seeking to claim a huge chunk of his neighbor's prime riverfront turf. Alarms go off for Allison when she sees somebody snooping around the rocks where Keating had died. Two other issues are causing pressure, too. Hunters and guides are turning up violently ill from drinking Flat Tops water and a mystery man is sneaking around camp, leaving odd messages and strange maps. The way of life in the rugged Colorado mountain wilderness is very much at stake. Allison finds the killer's trail but the killer sets his own trap, using the same simple but wicked device that murdered her client.

«Buried by the Roan» is the second in the Allison Coil Mystery Series. “Antler Dust” is the first and "Trapline” is the third.