Sheriff Sam Daly, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, and his husband, Michael Bellomo, have made a life for themselves in sparsely populated Pine County in the Colorado mountains. Sam oversees the small sheriff's department, and Michael sells his paintings and tourist items out of his shop, Needful Things. From the beginning, Sam has known Michael possessed gifts: the ability to see and hear things Sam cannot.


When a report of a body in a massive snow-filled depression up a mountainside sends Sam and his deputy, Digger, to investigate, Sam struggles to reconcile the existence of skinwalkers in Pine County with the world he's familiar with. Michael, though, deals with this reality through his art, and through the mysticism he's been gifted. Sam's effort to discover what is happening causes him to examine his life with Michael from the time they first met. The inevitable conclusion might be that he'll never understand the mysteries of the mountains, but for the sake of Michael and their love, he'll have to embrace them.

George Seaton lives and writes in Pine, Colorado, a mountain community an hour southwest of Denver. His work focuses on the American West-primarily Colorado and Wyoming-and the gay men who live in and discover the worth of themselves against the backdrop of the Rocky Mountains. He shares his life with his husband, David, and their Malamute, Kuma.