A PHOENIX COLD CASE: David Mapstone has returned to Phoenix, Arizona, the desert city he left behind a lifetime ago. The ex-cop, ex-history professor is working the police dept's cold case desk, unearthing long-buried secrets. And he's good at it: as an ex-historian Mapstone knows the past is never past, as an ex-cop he knows he can't trust anybody...

ARIZONA DREAMS: Mapstone has received a letter confessing to a forty-year-old murder and providing directions to the body, but things are never what they seem in Phoenix. Buried beneath a mound of bowling-ball-sized rocks in the desert west of Tonopah, there's a body right where the letter said it would be – but it's only weeks old, not years.

Its not the only fresh body, either. As the death count rises, the clues keep pointing back to the same remote piece of desert and a real-estate development called Arizona Dreams. But Mapstone knows something sinister is fueling this increasingly dangerous case...