HITMAN: A Nestor Pike Mystery Thriller

Sicario Meets The Big Sleep at The O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, the town too tough to die. At what point does killing someone become a moral act? Ex-cop, ex-private investigator Nestor Pike is mercilessly dragged along to Tombstone Arizona by his own unerring sense of responsibility. Initially there are sinking allegations of child molestation against a beloved but thorny old activist priest, Father Frank Alvarez, that Daisy Vasquez, Nestor Pike’s ex-lover and partner is attempting to disprove. She has gone missing in the process. All Nes knows is that her body has not been found and that her ex-husband, Danny Ochoa, ex-cop, is somehow involved. Southeast Arizona is a war zone. Conflict assails Nes from all directions: Tucson to Tombstone, Bisbee to Juarez, Naco to Nogales, death hunts along the Amnesty Trail in this blistering landscape. Turning over rocks to see what’s beneath is dangerous business. Snakes and coyotes of the two-legged variety abound. Heavily-armed cartels are beheading people in their quest to control smuggling routes for drugs, guns, money and the most profitable of all, human flesh. Worse still, amidst racial, environmental, border and illegal immigrant issues, he’s apprehensive, unable to trust his intuition, losing his edge and his marriage. Having lost his only child, Nes is not himself . . . but is he a hitman? The bottom has fallen out of his world. And he's is on a dire personal journey to rediscover just who and what he is. In transit, he’s befriended by Thomas Thundercloud, a mixed-blood Chiricahua Apache who becomes a catalyst for transformation within the moral landscape of Nestor Pike. Ultimately, Nes’s deeply experienced journey into his personal relationships, his country and his culture is a life in progress that challenges the reader to delve deep inside him or herself for the resolutions to the universal moral conundrums that vex us all.