The Cowboy Rides Away

Chloe Newcomb has left behind her past and all the paraphernalia of her life in New York. She's living in a partially renovated little house in Old Dudley, Arizona, and making half a living as a victim witness - bearer of bad news, shoulder to cry on, adviser to the shattered. One night her job takes her out to a lonely shack in the desert where a man has committed suicide. Although he had changed his name and looked like a born-and-bred cowboy, she is shocked to recognize him as someone she knew long ago, a former friend and lover who had gone out of her life twenty years earlier. Randall Hartman was a dedicated, energetic, left-wing activist. Not a man to kill himself, Chloe is convinced; she suspects homicide, although the police aren't so sure. Because her past has come back to life, she begins to look for Randall's murderer - and for the reasons that led him to a new identity and a life of isolation. The answers must be picked out from a tangle of knotted threads, and Chloe's efforts make a very satisfying and engrossing debut novel.