Hired by the Bureau of Land Management, Millie Whitehall travels to the harsh environment of northwest New Mexico's high desert. Driving treacherous roads and avoiding rattlesnakes become the least of her worries. What Millie expects to be a peaceful summer turns into a chaotic hunt for a ruthless killer.

Millie experiences the friction of working for the BLM through the characters she meets--a secretive cowboy, friendly oil and gas hand, out-spoken environmentalist, foreign tourist, and a cheeky Navajo biologist. Some of these become allies, one ends up threatening her life.

When autopsies reveal the seemingly unrelated deaths involve plants, Millie draws on her knowledge of ecology as she races to investigate the murderer--before she becomes the next victim.