Broken Landscape

A POVERTY STRICKEN crippled girl troubled with flaws and plagued by her beauty is abducted and taken to a mountain cabin. To save her, the boy she grew up with-and to whom she was "wed" at age twelve by a carnival gypsy-commits murder. Together they cover up the crime. A ruthless sheriff's deputy, obsessed with the girl's imperfections and allure, discovers what they've done and attempts to blackmail her for sex by kidnapping her younger sister. This senseless act leads not only to a series of additional deaths, cover-ups, and misery, but ultimately to redemption. THE STORY takes place in the high desert valley of a small southern Utah town where the Shoshone once roamed. While the war in Vietnam is beginning to rage, the boy and the girl are left with the remnants of an Old West, including the discovery of an ancient obsidian dagger, a benevolent sheriff, and an abandoned mineshaft. This, together with their love, is all they have to save them and make sense of the "broken landscape" they inhabit and which in turn inhabits them.