The Cowboy Rides Away — Betsy Thornton

The last good-bye's the hardest one to say. This is where the cowboy rides away... .

Thunder rumbles over the high desert. Heat rises from the dusty streets. And in a house in the valley the coppery smell of death is in the air. Chloe Newcomb has come as part of a victim notification team. Her job will be to tell a precocious thirteen-year-old girl that her father is dead. But when Chloe comes face-to-face with the dead man in his living room, her whole world shifts. Because in that instant she sees an old lover from an old lifetime, his head bathed in blood.

Without thinking, Chloe makes her choice: not to tell any-one, not even the cop she's falling in love with, about the dead man's true identity. Instead, she starts to investigate the strange route that brought Randall Hartman, a former radical, to the Arizona desert and this violent end. For Chloe, it's a mystery that gets stranger with every turn, as it leads her back to a single moment that changed lives forever--and that has brought a killer to her side... .