Diligent Barker has pushed the past aside in an effort to find his future. He’s a hardworking wrangler who likes to whittle and adores kids. The buried memories he holds for a lost daughter, brutally murdered, are rekindled by a young girl who shows up in his new life. Love and loss help this hardened cowboy accept strange and wonderful things, even the possibility that his own little girl might be channeling back to him through another precocious child. A child looking for her own parents’ killers. But evil runs deep in Diligent’s town. He’s not the only one with something to hide. What the others are up to makes Barker’s past look like child’s play. Forced to face his own dark past, Diligent is guided by a girl who may not be real but is willing to be as alive as it takes to find justice. — A “Reader’s Choice” selection from Writers of the West