Sage Landing in the mid-1980's is a small, isolated high-desert community located on the edges of both the Navajo Nation and a very large lake. The landscape resembles your mental image of the Grand Canyon. Stark, dry, and sandy, it's kind of a frontier town—there's  only one traffic light and no McDonald's. The churches and schools are more visible than the bars, but they're not as crowded.

Naomi Manymules is bluffing her way into a new paralegal career for which she is not entirely qualified. Luckily, she’s smart and feisty and has lived in Sage Landing all her life, so she knows just about everything that goes on here on the western edge of the Navajo Nation. She’s also got some training and a lot of motivation; as a divorced, thirty-something mom of two, she needs a steady job and wants a professional career.

Grant Carson is middle-aged, cynical, and handsomely scruffy. He's a reluctant attorney, a tough ex-prosecutor from Phoenix who has escaped to a remote lakeside town to practice just enough law to augment his small pension. Since arriving in Sage Landing, he's kept company with some attractive women, but the real passion of his life now is his old yacht, the Deep Inn.

The Lake is bigger than life, crossing two states and measuring almost 200 miles long and 25 miles wide. Parts of it are so expansive that the Coast Guard rates them as open sea; other parts are claustrophobically narrow. In some places, there are wide, sandy beaches, but in others, vertical cliffs of red sandstone and weathered limestone jut straight up from the water's surface.
In Coyote Alibi, Naomi hears someone swimming in the darkness below her, and she knows that there is nowhere nearby to climb out.

Photo credits: Natalia Bratslavsky (top of page), Elzbieta Sekowska (bottom of page)