The Scorpion's Tail

The first installment in the Nora Kelly series opens on a dark Paris riverfront, where a man in a tailored suit murders a cyclist he hired to rob a grave in a Parisian cemetery. The killer takes a wrapped object from the cyclist's backpack and dumps the body in the Seine, establishing a shadowy conspiracy that will not come into focus until the novel's climax.

In California's Gold Rush country, historian Clive Benton breaks into a condemned mansion once belonging to a daughter of Jacob Donner, one of the leaders of the infamous Donner Party, the group of nineteenth-century emigrants who became snowbound in the Sierra Nevada and resorted to cannibalism. He finds what he has long sought: the lost journal of Tamzene Donner, George Donner's wife.

Clive brings his discovery to Nora Kelly, a field archaeologist and director at the Santa Fe Archaeological Institute in New Mexico. He explains that the journal describes a third, previously unknown "Lost Camp," where eleven people became stranded in a dead-end canyon. The camp descended into extreme cannibalism and madness, with only one survivor. The journal contains landmarks, including a cliff face shaped like an old woman's profile, and a hand-drawn map pointing to the camp's location.

When the Institute's president, Jill Fugit, rejects the proposal as too expensive, Clive reveals that a pioneer named Wolfinger carried a chest of gold coins that two fellow travelers, Reinhardt and Spitzer, stole after murdering him. Bank records suggest the chest contained a thousand gold eagles worth approximately twenty million dollars in collector's value. Fugit agrees to finance the expedition, with the proceeds to be split among California, the federal government, and the Institute.

In a parallel storyline, FBI Special Agent Corrie Swanson, a recent graduate of the FBI Academy at Quantico, chafes under months of cold case reviews at the Albuquerque field office. Her supervisor, Supervisory Special Agent Hale Morwood, assigns her a lead role when a small-time criminal named Frank Serban is found shot execution-style at Pigeon's Ranch, a Civil War cemetery at Glorieta Pass, New Mexico. Serban was hired to exhume an iron coffin, and the upper half of the corpse inside, that of a Confederate woman named Florence Parkin Regis, has been sawed off and stolen.

As Corrie investigates, she discovers that graves belonging to people named Parkin have been violated across three countries, and a living Parkin, a young lawyer named Rosalie Parkin, has vanished from her Scottsdale apartment under bloody circumstances. Using genealogical records, Corrie traces all the victims to a single common ancestor: Albert Parkin, a member of the Donner Party who died at the Lost Camp that the Institute is about to excavate. Morwood is skeptical but allows Corrie a brief visit to the expedition.

The expedition rides into the Sierra Nevada from Red Mountain Ranch, an outfitting operation run by Ford Burleson, a towering former lawyer turned rancher. His crew includes Jack Peel, a devout and taciturn wrangler; Maggie Buck, a boisterous cook fond of Donner Party ghost stories; and Drew Wiggett, a young veterinary student. After searching tributary canyons for the old woman's profile described in the journal, Nora conducts a test excavation in Poker Canyon and finds a human tooth inches below the surface.

The excavation produces rich discoveries. A midden heap, a communal refuse pile, contains cannibalized skulls and bones. Clive uncovers two skeletons with gold coins hidden in their boots: five ten-dollar gold eagles each, dated 1846. Nora identifies them as Reinhardt and Spitzer. Near the creek, she finds the nearly complete skeleton of a small child with a silver hair clasp: Samantha Carville. Further excavation reveals the child's right leg was chopped off at the knee, confirming a grisly legend Maggie had told. When Corrie visits the site, she examines the midden heap but cannot identify Parkin among the bones. After Corrie departs, Nora uses advanced software to provisionally match reassembled bone fragments to Parkin based on a documented arrow wound but decides to wait for DNA confirmation before reporting the finding.

Clive despairs that only ten coins exist, but Nora argues they are pocket money the killers carried, proof the main strongbox is hidden elsewhere. When Burleson learns about the gold, he is furious at having been deceived.

Peel, deeply disturbed by the excavation of human remains and provoked by Clive's dismissal of his religious concerns, disappears overnight with several stolen bones, including the Carville skeleton and the midden skulls. He is later found dead at the base of a cliff where he had been building a stone cairn to bury the bones. When the recovered artifacts are cataloged, Parkin's skull is missing. Corrie suspects murder based on a contusion she believes predated the fall, but the coroner rules the death accidental.

Days later, Wiggett is found strangled and drowned, his body wedged into a rock crevice near camp. Corrie orders the camp evacuated, and the team retreats to Truckee. Morwood criticizes Corrie for revealing her suspicions about Peel's murder prematurely and for poor coordination with local law enforcement, then tells her the case will be transferred to the Sacramento field office. Fugit arrives and pressures Nora to find the gold to recoup the Institute's investment.

On her final ride down the mountain, Corrie stumbles upon an old campsite and finds a Dunhill cigar butt, the same brand Clive smokes. The next morning, Clive vanishes from his hotel with a stolen horse and rifle. In his room, Nora discovers a document he never shared: a death almanac of the Lost Camp written by the preacher Asher Boardman.

Nora and Corrie ride up through a storm and observe Clive concealing something in a cavity at the base of the cliffs, beneath a massive, unstable cornice of snow. When they descend to retrieve it, Clive fires at the cornice, triggering an avalanche that buries them both. Nora digs herself free, but Clive appears with the rifle, revealing he does not care about the gold. Fugit arrives on horseback, takes a blue artifact box from Clive containing Parkin's skull, and shoots him dead. As Fugit turns the gun on Nora, Corrie, who survived the avalanche, shoots Fugit from behind, wounding her and spoiling her aim.

In the work tent, Nora treats both wounded women while she and Corrie piece together the conspiracy. The death almanac reveals that everyone who ate Parkin's flesh went insane and died within days, while those who abstained remained lucid. They theorize that Parkin was a rare genetic carrier of a fast-acting prion disease similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal degenerative brain condition, but lethal in days rather than decades. A shadowy organization apparently sought to weaponize this pathogen, orchestrating the grave robberies to obtain Parkin's remains. A helicopter arrives to evacuate them.

In the aftermath, Corrie visits Ernest Parkin, Rosalie's younger brother, in Scottsdale. Back at the dig site, FBI Special Agent Pendergast, who worked previous cases with Nora, deduces the gold's location by reasoning that Reinhardt and Spitzer would have moved the strongbox higher as the snowpack deepened, using the old woman's rock profile as their landmark. Nora climbs roughly 20 feet to the spot he indicates and finds the iron strongbox filled with gold coins. She then buries the reassembled skeleton of Samantha Carville, including the recovered leg bone, in a simple pine coffin with no clergy, ceremony, or grave marker. Pendergast suggests the archaeologist and the forensic anthropologist might make effective partners on future cases.