The Charmstone — C.C. Harrison

Mystery, history and love set against the spectacular landscape of Monument Valley on the Navajo Indian Reservation. This tightly plotted contemporary romantic suspense will keep readers turning pages as lapsed socialite Amanda Bell travels to this remote desert to fulfill her deceased father's last wish -- deliver and archive his Southwest literary collection, a gift to the fledgling Cultural Center.

To Durango Yazzie, the Center's Navajo director, her arrival is an unexpected and intrusive reminder to an already superstitious community of the fiery car crash in the desert and the body still out there never properly put to rest. Bitterness had chased him from the reservation as a youth, but it was the hard lessons he learned outside that sent him back, newly committed to preserving his culture.

Readers will be swept along as Amanda and Durango come to grips with stolen antiquities, unsavory truths from the past, rumors of scandal, secretive teenagers who spend too much time in the desert, a scheming small town newspaper editor who knows everything but tells nothing, and a threatening presence watching their every move. Can an ancient charmstone protect them from their enemies?