Beware the Shifting Sands
Silver Secrets and Murderous Ambitions in the Black Hills
A Killer Is Rewriting a Familiar Tale
A 1920s Black Hills murder mystery where silver, secrets, and a familiar fairy tale point toward a killer.
At 33, Parker Simms has little interest in children’s stories. A veteran of the Great War and a private detective in New York City, he has witnessed enough real darkness to know that life rarely resembles a fairy tale.
In the summer of 1928, unwanted attention surrounding the Teapot Dome Scandal sends Simms back to his roots in western South Dakota. What begins as a temporary escape from New York soon becomes a dangerous investigation when silver-mining tycoon Dwayne McDonough asks for his help. Someone is murdering the businessman’s associates—and each crime appears to contain a disturbing connection to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
To understand the killer’s pattern, Simms reluctantly joins forces with Sandra Groves, a former love who is now a local schoolteacher, and her fiancé, history professor Archie Yeager. Together, they follow a trail of carefully constructed clues through the rugged Black Hills, where mining fortunes, personal grudges, and long-buried secrets have created no shortage of suspects.
As the investigation deepens, the trio encounters the darker realities beneath the prosperity and mythology of the 1920s West, including extortion, nativism, racial prejudice, and the influence of the Ku Klux Klan. Suspicion reaches into law enforcement, the mining industry, local communities, and even those who appear to be the killer’s intended victims.
With fact and fiction becoming increasingly difficult to separate, Simms must uncover the truth before the final chapter ends in murder.
