Cactus Heart

By Jon Talton

In this "prequel" to the popular David Mapstone mysteries, author Jon Talton takes us back to 1999, when everything dot-com was making money, the Y2K bug was the greatest danger facing the world, and the good times seemed as if they would never end.

It was a time before David and Lindsey were together, before Mike Peralta was sheriff, and before David had rid himself of the sexy and mysterious Gretchen.

In Phoenix, it's the sweet season and Christmas and the new millennium are only weeks away. But history professor David Mapstone, just hired by the Sheriff's Office, still finds trouble, chasing a robber into an abandoned warehouse and discovering a gruesome crime from six decades ago.

Mapstone begins an investigation into a Depression-era kidnapping that transfixed Arizona and the nation: the disappearance of a cattle baron's grandsons, their bodies never found. And although the kidnapper was caught and executed, Mapstone uncovers evidence that justice was far from done. But this is no history lesson. The cattle baron's heirs now run a Fortune 500 company and wield far more clout than a former-professor-turned-deputy. Then one of the heirs turns up dead....

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sourcebooks
• Release date: Jun 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781615952069

Jon Talton

Jon Talton is a fourth-generation Arizonan who grew up in the same neighbourhood that Mapstone calls home. He is the author of nine novels, including the Mapstone mysteries, The Pain Nurse and Deadline Man.

Reviews for Cactus Heart

[cknikka · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Another good read... prequel… its 1999 we get lots of back fill on the characters and there are still lots of twists and turns and explores some of the complex relationships we have with old friends and our relationships with the opposite sex. It looks again at Arizona history with some snapshots of how the state and the city were built. The opening line in the book…. “Throughout history, the desert has been a place of trail, penance, and hard-won revelation. God lives in the desert. But Satan does too. In the American West, conquistadors and cowboys were tested, and often broken, by the desert. Its vastness hid no cities of gold. Its implacable heat and drought were hostile to the white man’s crops and cattle. Even as the frontier disappeared, the Sonora Desert remained a wild and unknown place, the home of strange gods, a waterless world of danger and mystery. This is more fun stuff. It is a good stand alone book and a welcome addition to the series.