Desert Kill Switch just received the first prize for fiction in the 2018 Great Southwest Book Festival.  An awards dinner will be held in April to honor the winners of the competition.

The book is set in the fictional central Arizona county of San Navarro, in Las Vegas and in Reno, Nevada.  It begins with a body, found in the Arizona desert, that disappears once sheriff’s deputies get to the scene.  While the desert murder remains a mystery, the story moves from Arizona to Nevada.  Protagonists Kate Sorensen and Lyle Deming travel from Reno to Las Vegas and back to Reno searching for the person who murdered Vegas car dealer Alvin Busick. 

Sorensen is accused of Busick’s murder and must find the killer before the police find her.

The book is the second in the Nostalgia City Mystery Series that takes place in Nostalgia City, a  theme park that re-creates an entire small town from the mid-1970s.  The third book in the series, The Marijuana Murders, will be published soon by Black Opal Books.

Desert Kill Switch was also nominated for a Top Shelf Magazine Indie Award for books from small publishers.