Dead Lizard's Dance

Three deaths near the village of Santa Fe are seemingly unrelated, except they are so gruesome they just could be the work of witches. Governor Anza begs Nando to return to dampen the witch fear building in town; all very well except one of the women he is supposed to hunt down may be his own girl friend. And who killed the pretty prostitute, and then the caravan master, who seems to own half the town?

Three deaths near the village of Santa Fe are seemingly unrelated, except they are so gruesome they just could be the work of witches. Governor Anza begs Nando to return to dampen the witch fear building in town; all very well except one of the women he is supposed to hunt down may be his own girl friend. And who killed the pretty prostitute, and then the caravan master, who seems to own half the town? Desperation mounts as fleeing women capture Nando and leave him to die in a remote mountain cave. Join New Mexico’s Governor Anza, the two-fisted old lady who is Nando’s stepmother, and a host of unlikely villains: priests, medicine women, and wealthy landowners, in a roiling saga of unforgettable vigor from the time when the American deserts belonged to the King of Spain.

Pamela Christie has lived and written in New Mexico since 1970. Her two historical mysteries derive in part from a decade of living in a remote Hispanic village in Northern New Mexico. She received her education at Bryn Mawr College, Pitzer College and the University of California at Berkeley. Life in New Mexico, whether teaching in a country school, or being a construction worker, or for many years a Realtor in Santa Fe, offered plenty of chances to explore the landscape she writes about, and to find evidence of the people who lived in the rugged kingdom centuries ago. Pam’s writing began in earnest in 2000 after a driving trip across the west and a chance encounter with a Navajo when her van broke down. In the year that followed she wrote The King’s Lizard, polishing it until its publication in 2004. In 2007, The King’s Lizard was awarded the New Mexico Press Women’s Zia Book Award for the best work of fiction written by a New Mexico woman over a three-year period. Dead Lizard’s Dance, a sequel, followed in 2009. Given today’s relentless push into technology, Pam enjoys the 18th century and the chance to ‘be here then.’ Local, hand-made and sustainable, Pam’s books are stories of the land she loves that come not only from rigorous research, but from the heart.