The hardworking single mother of a young daughter, Joanna Brady still feels the acute pain of loneliness and loss, and the hole that was left in her heart when her policeman husband was brutally murdered. But Sheriff Brady is the law in Cochise County, and she will never allow her private trials to interfere with the job she was elected to perform - especially now that murder has shattered the small town's fragile peace. A local gun dealer has died violently, and his stock of high-powered weapons has been cleaned out. When two more slayings follow soon after, suspicion falls upon rancher Alton Hosfield, an embittered man at war with the federal government, environmentalists, area newcomers, the local law - with anyone, in fact, whom he perceives as a threat to his home, his family, his freedom, and his isolation. Sheriff Brady suspects, however, that the solution is not so cut-and-dried.