In Arizona’s harsh land of enduring legend, Peter Romero witnesses his cousin’s violent death. While investigating, he must survive bullets, drug dealers, and angry local Apaches. Confronted by a supernatural coyote and befriended by an old man descended from Cochise, Romero uses his ancestors’ spiritual power to protect a secret five hundred years old while solving the crime.

Ancestral spirits demand that Marine veteran Peter Romero protect the secrecy of a sacred burial ground, and the world becomes a stranger place than he’d ever understood. He is pitted against a psychotic anthropology professor in a life-and-death struggle through the hills, arroyos, and caves of central Arizona, and into another world. When Romero’s cousin is murdered, the former military policeman is astonished that the local sheriff shows no enthusiasm for solving the crime. He is forced to recognize that, after a military career, greater danger lies ahead in his civilian life. Romero takes up arms to mete out his own justice, but he must decide if he belongs to the world he sees, or to a spirit world in which he discovers the strength of his ancestors. He makes their power a part of his being. As a spirit warrior, Romero battles self-doubt, his wife’s threats of divorce, and local law enforcement who plan his murder. He confronts an armed gang bent on revenge, skirts federal agents intent on stopping him, and evades the deadly fire of a deranged sniper. Aided by a wise tribal elder, Romero uncovers a tangle of clues that link his cousin’s death to trafficking in ancient treasures and a deadly conspiracy that centers him in their crosshairs. Romero combines his combat experience and the fighting skills of his ancestors to dispatch his enemies and protect an ancient secret.

David E. Knop is a retired Marine officer with twenty years of service. He saw two tours in Vietnam as an artillery forward observer and naval gunfire support officer. As a staff officer, he wrote and edited numerous military operations plans. Dave also authored feature articles for the Field Artillery Journal and Marine Corps Gazette. In civilian life, Dave became a technical writer and produced many electronic and automotive manuals for industry leaders such as SAIC and Computer Sciences Corporation. Dave’s work for the Eighth Air Force received an award of excellence in a Northern California Society of Technical Communications competition. Dave’s first novel, The Smoked Mirror, a supernatural thriller featuring former Marine Cochiti Pueblo police officer Peter Romero, placed honorable mention in both the Maryland Writers' Association and Reading Writers contests. The manuscript also qualified top ten in the Wahmpreneur Books Fiction contest. Dave’s second mystery, Mining Sacred Ground, brings the role of spirit warrior to the subgenre of Native American detectives, and was a semi-finalist in the last Amazon.com Breakthrough Novel Contest. Dave’s third novel, Poisoned by God’s Flesh is a work in progress. An alumnus of Book Passage Mystery Writer’s workshops, Taos Institute of the Arts, Maui Writer’s Retreats, Dave is a lifelong student of Native American mythology and is a member of Sisters in Crime and an affiliate member of the Mystery Writers of America.