Author Carol Potenza's debut novel, Hearts of the Missing, won the Tony Hillerman Prize for Best First Mystery Set in the Southwest and her sophomore novel was so good she is now on my automatic-buy list.

I have read every Tony Hillerman book and, being raised in the Southwest, loved how he (and later his daughter Anne Hillerman) captured so beautifully the aura of the land and its people. “Author Carol Potenza is now on my automatic-buy list. Will she bring them to justice? Or just make them disappear?

No way Nicky is ever going to let anyone hurt her mother, even if it means tracking the murderers into New Mexico high country in the depths of winter. But her mother’s return is the opening the killers need-and their fatal mistake. Instead, she barges back into her daughter’s life, determined to help Nicky solve the murder, and heal their contentious relationship. Nicky insists she stay away because her mother is a target. Or was it? Nicky’s estranged mother may hold the key to the plant’s rediscovery.

But when her father died, the identity and location of the plant that produced this compound was lost. He’d isolated the single most-important compound in a fertility treatment worth a fortune … and one worth killing for. What Nicky keeps secret is this medicine was once at the center of her father’s scientific research. When a murder victim falls out of a closet at Police Sergeant Nicky Matthews’ feet, her investigation leads her to a powerful tribal fertility medicine.

Carol potenza books