Does the "Lady of the Lake," a large grey stone whose lower half resembles a woman's body, hold the key to who murdered two Washoe Indian men up at Lake Tahoe? W.W. Ronin, an ex-Episcopal priest turned bounty hunter, is about to find out. With help from his Washoe shaman friend, Happy Hands -- interpreter of dreams, earth-bound spiritualist and stranger to the white man's rituals -- Ronin is easing closer to an answer as the pair meanders up and down the Carson Valley in 1880s Nevada. It will take a plethora of people, including Emma Naumann, guardian of children at the local Christian mission ... his best buddy and occasional partner in crime Deputy Marcus T. "Dustsucker" Slade ... and the contrary but capable U.S. Marshal Augustus Ash ... to form an unlikely posse good enough to unravel the mystery. As Ronin's continuing adventures find him engaged in more gun battles and heartaches than any aging but still formidable former reverend ought to endure, he begins to discover what makes his own life shimmer even as he pursues the desperadoes who took the lives of the Indians at the lake. The second in the W. W. Ronin series of Westerns, by Gregg Edwards Townsley's: "Real people. Real places. The way the West was really won."