In the early hours of the morning after Valentine's Day [in 1976], fourteen-year-old Gloria Ramírez appears on the front porch of Mary Rose Whitehead's ranch house, broken and barely alive. The teenager had been viciously attacked in a nearby oil field--an act of brutality that is tried in the churches and barrooms of Odessa before it can reach a court of law. When justice is evasive, the stage is set for a showdown with potentially devastating consequences....

Hoping the adventure of a raft trip in Big Bend National Park will lift her spirits, Paul takes Anna to southwest Texas. Instead of the soul-soothing experience they'd longed for, the couple finds a pregnant woman--more dead than alive--and soon they are sucked into a labyrinth of intrigue that leads from the Mexican desert to the steps of the Governor's Mansion in Austin.

"When Hannah Cartwright meets Grant, a disreputable-looking cowboy, she's determined to keep him from exploiting two more orphans. When she gets the job as schoolmarm, she resolves to keep Grant's adopted children in school to minimize their time spent in hard labor on his ranch. Will she succeed in her plans or lose her heart--and the children--to a man she despises? Grant already has a Texas ranch full of orphans he's rescued, but still he's determined...

On a retreat in St. Theresa's, a convent in Texas, sleuth China Bayles observes nuns fighting over a legacy worth millions of dollars. One lot wants the money for more contemplation, the other for commerce.