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The Cactus Plot

By: Vicky Ramakka
Narrated by: Maria Marquis
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Publisher's Summary

“What have I gotten myself into!”

Botanist Millie Whitehall leaves her New Jersey home to take a job in New Mexico. She plans to spend a peaceful summer surveying rare plants. Instead she becomes entangled in two heartless murders. Millie befriends one too many characters that she encounters during her work in the back country. Will it be the friendly oil and gas hand, out-spoken environmentalist, laid-back cowboy, charming foreign tourist, or handsome young Navajo biologist that ends up threatening her life?

Cozy mystery lovers will enjoy adventuring along with Millie as she draws on her knowledge of ecology to save an endangered cactus, before she—and the cactus—face extinction at the hands of the murderer.

©2019 Vicky Ramakka (P)2022 Artemesia Publishing, LLC

Critic Reviews

"This book could be the seed of a new series of mysteries set in our beautiful Southwest." — Anne Hillerman, New York Times best-selling author of the "Chee-Leaphorn-Manuelito" series.
"Vicky Ramakka's page-turner, The Cactus Plot does an excellent job at capturing the sense of place and people of Northwestern New Mexico." — Jonathan Thompson, environmental journalist and author of River of Lost Souls: The Science, Politics, and Greed Behind the Gold King Mine Disaster
"This is a delicious, layered Cozy Mystery/Women Sleuth paperback. Tall, gangly young Millie Whitehall takes a job as a botanist for the BLM to survey endangered plants in Four Corners country, New Mexico. An archeologist has just plunged off a cliff and died. But fellow BLM worker, Momma Agnes says, "That don't make sense ... He was strong as an ox and knew the back country better than most." This suspicious death is followed by two more. Millie learns about fracking, contradictions in fed­eral policy and how an oil field hand can back off from a rattlesnake. She is introduced to wild mustangs, Monster Slayer and Changing Woman, and how to make Navajo fry bread. The characters are vivid and eager to share their stories, but the plot is slow to develop. Nevertheless, it's an informed cultural and ecological immersion rolled up in a mystery. Four stars." —Phaedra Greenwood, enchantment Magazine

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