Sacred Stones

Ryan Taggert was heading back to Denver to step off the gun trail and win a mayoral election.  But fate had something else in store for him as an old man and a young boy stumble into his camp in Monument Valley with a tale so desperate it cannot be ignored.

Taggert pledges to help the dying man by returning stolen sacred stones from an ancient Anasazi kiva.  Stones that had brought the old man nothing but bad luck from the moment he took them.  Taggert also promises to return his young grandson to his mother holding down a stage line outpost in Southeastern Utah in the heart of Ute country.  A woman so unusual, and so daring, that the Utes call her unoop’ekunt kookwup’ mumowts’ and fear her powerful medicine.

But when Taggert reaches the stage station he runs into an attacking Ute war party which leaves him for dead and steals the boy, his mother, and leaves the station in ashes.  When Taggert awakens, he finds himself a prisoner of a Navajo woman with a new baby, two horses, and a dead husband.  Vowing death to the Utes, the widow forces Taggert to redeem her husband’s dead spirit by killing the men who shot him.

Tracking the Ute war party into a high mountain canyon, Taggert devises a desperate plan.  Using the mother, her crying baby, and the spirit of the kiva stones, Taggert attacks.  But not even the Great Spirit could have conceived what the Navajo woman does next and Taggert barely escapes with his life and those of the woman and boy.  Once on the trail, they are pursued by Utes and Navajos alike who have grown to fear Crazy Broom Woman whose legend has quickly spread across four states.

Knowing the sacred kiva stones are the cause of all their troubles, Taggert leads them to the Pastoras in eastern Arizona along the New Mexico border.  There they climb up into a cliff dwelling to find an even stranger mystery that sends Taggert on the most incredible experience of his life.

For once he steps into the kiva, he is spirited back a thousand years to the time of the dwelling builders, those before the Anasazi, before the Ancient Ones, before the time of the ancestors.  Taggert is drawn across time and space to save a woman and her people from being lost to the pages of history.

This is another Taggert adventure of the Old West.  Taking place in the Four Corners area, the adventure begins and ends in 1891.  In between is an incredible journey to the past where the mystery of cliff dwellings and a forgotten people unfold; where Taggert's life, and the lives of those he loves, depends on the whim of sacred stones that described for the ancients the four corners of the world and the three gods that formed it.

Del DowDell is a talented writer, speaker and artist. He has written over a dozen fiction books, nearly a dozen non-fiction works, more than two dozen screenplays, and lectured in over 40 states.  As a scientific hobbyist and researcher, he has written several volumes on the fallacies of scientific beliefs, such as the Inaccuracy of the Carbon-14 Time Clock, Scientific Refutations of Organic Evolution, The Fallacy of the Geologic Time Scale, and The Big Bang Theory is a Dud. He has also authored several works on Mesoamerica and the Andes Mountains, disproving the old belief that earliest inhabitants of North and South America arrived via a land bridge across the Aleutians.  His work on What’s What in the Legal Hut was used by businesses and major corporations to design and implement training programs on legal management methods.

Del is also a talented lecturer, having been invited to speak to and train thousands throughout the country on far ranging subjects from corporate management to self-image psychology.  He developed some of the earliest understandings of Behavioral Styles that swept the country in the 1980s, writing several works and holding numerous seminars on the subject. 

Currently, Del is involved in the organization and operations of several companies, consults with corporations on management techniques, provides numerous works to help the fledging writer, owns an internet retail sales company, and has begun raising, breeding and selling koi fish.

An avid researcher and trivia buff, all of Del’s works are both scientifically and historically accurate.  As a father of seven and a grandfather of 16 and counting, Del’s diverse and copious experiences and credentials show up in his ability to write science-fiction, westerns, contemporary political thrillers, military adventures, and comedic works with equal aplomb.

A former baseball pitcher and architect, Del currently lives with his wife of 40 years in a house he personally designed and they built themselves on a high ridge overlooking a spacious valley in a rural area of Southern Utah.