Eye of the Raven

Down and out in New York, aspiring journalist Cali Vargas thinks she's hit bottom until she phones home and hears her mother being brutally murdered. In Cortez, Colorado police find Nina Vargas's body riddled with bizarre punctures and strewn with raven feathers. The raven DNA found in Nina's wounds leads forensics to conclude that a raven-inflicted puncture through her right eye had caused a brain hemorrhage and death. An old family friend tells Cali, that driven by a nightmare, Nina had dug up the dead agave in her backyard. Tangled in its roots were an antique coin and an Ancient Puebloan basket. Within hours of begging the friend to hide them, the terrified Nina was murdered. Believing the killer is human and will return for the basket and coin, Cali withholds them from the police. Launching an investigation, she discovers that according to experts, the artifacts are authentic. They are also centuries and worlds apart - which begs the maddening question: Who buried a Toqala basket and an ancient Roman coin in Nina's backyard and why? Toqala. The word concocts an exotic brew of anxious curiosity, flooding her mind with questions Nina had refused to answer. Who is Cali's father? Is he Toqala and directly descended from the Ancients, too? Stonewalled, Cali had stopped asking - and now her mother was dead. Frightened but desperate for answers, Cali contacts the Toqala. Drawn into their dark past, she discovers who she really is and why her people had vanished from Mesa Verde centuries ago. In the hunt for her mother's killer, Cali unleashes a curse, and like Nina before her, Cali is now in the eye of the raven. In the hunt for her mother's killer, Cali becomes the hunted ...