The authorial spirits of Edward Abbey and Tony Hillerman meet in this contemporary western adventure in the American Southwest. In the spirit of Abbey’s fictional works, The Monkey Wrench Gang and Hayduke Lives, a rag-tag collection of westerners—archaeologists, cowboys, a teacher, a Native American, a bulldozer operator, and a fly-fisherwoman—take on a greed-driven gang of coal miners and grave robbers in the heat and dust of Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM). Battle lines drawn between environmentalists and pro-development rednecks melt away, concerns over roads being bulldozed into the wilderness are trivialized, and adversaries become allies when a common foe is discovered looting an elaborate prehistoric burial site in the inky depths of a limestone cavern in the wilds of the slickrock desert.