Lendle

The thirty-one member Young family gathers every year to spend spring break camping and riding the mountain bike trails around Moab, Utah.In the spring of 2012 twenty-six-year-old David stops his mountain bike for a water break on a single-track section of the Slickrock Bike Trail. Several family members stop in a single file line behind him. Suddenly a small boulder rolls down a dome and knocks David’s wife, Bree-Lynn, off the trail, and she falls five hundred feet to her death.Grand County Deputy Sheriff Craig Kerrigan investigates the case, learns David had a life insurance policy on Bree-Lynn, and wonders why David stopped on the most dangerous section of the Slickrock. When the Sheriff forbids Kerrigan from questioning other Young family members and orders him to remove his ‘murder’ conclusion from his official report of Bree-Lynn’s death, Kerrigan uses his brother’s business computer to send a confidential email to the Jupiter-Saturn Insurance Corporation.The insurance company sends Private Investigator Dan Ballantine to Moab. He meets with Kerrigan and learns the deputy fears for his job because the Mormons control Grand County. He attends Bree-Lynn’s memorial service in Salt Lake City, meets Brooke-Ann Jackson, Bree-Lynn’s athletic and aggressive sister, and sees a stranger named Malachi that nobody knows.When Ballantine finally meets and interviews David in a public park, he discovers Malachi observes them.Ballantine and Brooke-Ann ride the Slickrock Bike Trail together and reach the same conclusion as Deputy Sheriff Kerrigan: David Young helped somebody murder his wife, but proving it may be impossible.Ballantine and Brooke-Ann have to try.