A troubled Indian boy goes to live with an elderly rancher whose caring ways help the boy become a man.

For tribes of the American Southwest, the annual Sun Dance is among the most solemn and sacred of rituals. But lately Death has been an uninvited guest at the hallowed rite. Ute tribal policeman Charlie Moon is puzzled. The deceased Sun Dancers sustained no visible, life-ending injuries, so he is reluctant to call it murder -- though there is surely nothing "natural" about the sudden, inexplicable deaths of two strong and healthy men. Unlike her skeptical...

An eminently readable history of the Ute Indians of Colorado from earliest times to the present.

The world of Daisy Perika is a realm of shadows, omens, and restless spirits. In tribal policeman Charlie Moon's world, good and evil manifest themselves in more explainable, human ways. Yet the irascible and Ute shaman and her huge, good-natured nephew inhabit the same hard and lonely Colorado country. And now the parched earth has yielded up the remains of a gargantuan prehistoric beast on the site of a failed dude ranch - a find so enormous scientific...

Charlie Moon is treading on sacred ground...and he may live to regret it. The two sandstone monoliths -- a pair of massive natural giants towering over the southern Colorado landscape -- that stand before the hulking, good-natured former policeman turned rancher are wrapped in rich tribal lore and dark, ancient mystery. To the local Navajo, Pueblo, and Ute, they are the Twin War Gods, sons of the moon goddess White Shell Woman. Legends tell of strange...

dash of humor and a sprinkling of romance season Doss's eighth Charlie Moon mystery (after 2002's White Shell Woman). The part-time Ute tribal investigator and full-time rancher looks into the death of fellow tribesman Billy Smoke, murdered during an assault that left Billy's high-profile employer, Senator Patch Davidson, permanently crippled. An explosion at a new airport adds to the body count. Meanwhile, Charlie's acid-tongued Aunt Daisy, a shaman...

After the passage of the Dawes Severalty Act in 1887, the Southern Ute Agency was the scene of an intense federal effort to assimilate the Ute Indians. The Southern Utes were to break up their common land holdings and transform themselves into middle-class patriarchal farm and pastoral families. In this assimilationist scheme women were to surrender the greater autonomy they enjoyed in traditional Ute society and to become house-bound homemakers,...