Play of Color : The Widow’s Fire: A Petra Woods Mystery

Petra Woods can spot a fake the instant it touches her hand. But some of the oldest lies aren't fakes at all, they're just stories that grew past what really happened. Six months after New Mexico, Petra heads to Nevada's remote Virgin Valley chasing a real black fire opal, one of the rarest gemstones on Earth, only to find the isolated mining community consumed by a different kind of fever entirely. A struggling family mine claims to have recovered the legendary Sagebrush Widow, a cursed opal lost since 1911, and the story is drawing tourists from every direction. Then a young miner turns up dead at the bottom of the same gorge where the old legend says a boy died a century ago, and the valley's fear stops being folklore and starts feeling like something Petra can't ignore. The opal in her hands is real. The locket around it isn't nearly as old as it's supposed to be. And somewhere between a hundred-year-old tragedy and a young man's desperate attempt to save his father's business, Petra has to figure out where the truth actually ends and the story picked up on its own.