Black Sun Descending

Silas Pearson is plagued by nightmares. In them, his wife Penelope, who has now been missing for four years, is leading him to murder victims across the Colorado Plateau. When his dreams lead him to the Atlas Mill Tailings Project outside of Moab, Utah, Silas discovers the corpse of anti-uranium mining activist Jane Vaughn, who had gone missing from Flagstaff, Arizona. Silas travels across the Southwest and finds himself on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, trying to connect the murder with the disappearance of his wife, who was friends with Vaughn. There he confronts a host of suspects who wanted Jane Vaughn dead and who believed his wife, too, was interfering with progress on the Colorado Plateau. All the while, Pearson’s nightmares, threaded with snatches of prose from the writings of Edward Abbey, are leading him closer to some final confrontation ? but with what?

Stephen Legault is a full-time conservation activist, writer, photographer, and organizational development consultant. He is the author of Carry Tiger to Mountain: The Tao of Activism and Leadership, which he wrote based on his experience using the Tao Te Ching as a guide to his lifelong work protecting wilderness and wildlife, and Running Toward Stillness, a meditation on Buddhist spiritual practice, running, and parenthood.

Stephen is also the author of a number of historical and environmentally themed mysteries, including The End of the Line and The Third Riel Conspiracy, featuring Durrant Wallace, a sergeant with the North West Mounted Police in the late 1800s; The Slickrock Paradox and Black Sun Descending, the Red Rock Canyon Mysteries set in Utah's Canyonlands region; and The Vanishing Track and The Glacier Gallows, the most recent mysteries featuring Cole Blackwater, an environmentalist who finds himself solving crimes. Stephen is currently working on new books of photography, essays on spirituality, and more mystery novels.