If a rattlesnake kills with a little help, is it murder? Anthropologist Minoa Diamond encountered dangerous snakes doing fieldwork in Ecuador. But with her career on the skids, tending bar back in her hometown of Santa Fe, she finds out her high school buddy has died of rattlesnake bite. Everybody calls it an improbable accident. But too many rattlers are slithering around the lives of people who knew her and pretty soon another is struck and dies. Minoa must chase a rattler killer nobody believes in from the Indian pueblos of northern New Mexico to a souvenir shop in tiny Abiquiu, from the hideout of a venom trader to the oracle chamber of a New Age shaman. She encounters rattlesnakes in history, contemporary political struggles and her own nightmares. Will she figure out where the venom is coming from before the rattler killer strikes again?