Clear Title Buried Claim: A Petra Woods Mystery

Petra Woods has never once been wrong about a stone. Twenty years on the gem show circuit have taught her hands to know, instantly and without doubt, what's real and what's a lie dressed up in good lighting. But nothing in her, no gift, no instinct, no certainty, prepares her for the empty booth at the Tucson Gem Show where Harold Circalle should be.

Harold isn't just a fellow vendor. He's family, chosen twenty years ago and never once in question, and he promised her something special this year. Instead she finds a stranger in his spot, a voicemail box too full to take another message, and a swamp cooler running on a house that's been quietly falling apart for longer than anyone wants to admit.

What Petra uncovers is a bill of sale for a scrap of desert land nobody thought was worth anything, land that borders the legendary Sleeping Beauty turquoise mine, closed for over a decade and believed picked clean. Harold didn't just win that document in a card game. He walked the land himself and found what everyone else had missed.

Now Petra is the only one who knows what he knew, chasing his last days through a card table's worth of old friends, a slick appraiser with too many easy answers, and a corporate lawyer who's very good at saying nothing at all. With her cat, her dog, and Harold's elderly dachshund riding along in an RV that's seen better decades, Petra has to find out what Harold found in that ground before whoever silenced him decides she's next.