The Cactus Plot

Publisher: Artemesia Publishing, LLC

Hired by the Bureau of Land Management, Millie Whitehall travels to the harsh environment of northwest New Mexico’s high desert. Driving treacherous roads and avoiding rattlesnakes become the least of her worries. What Millie expects to be a peaceful summer turns into a chaotic hunt for a ruthless killer.

Millie experiences the friction of working for the BLM through the characters she meets—a secretive cowboy, friendly oil and gas hand, out-spoken environmentalist, foreign tourist, and a cheeky Navajo biologist. Some of these become allies, one ends up threatening her life.

When autopsies reveal the seemingly unrelated deaths involve plants, Millie draws on her knowledge of ecology as she races to investigate the murderer—before she becomes the next victim.

Vicky Ramakka grew up on a farm in upstate New York which sparked an early interest in plants and animals. She has spent most of her career in higher education in the western US while her husband worked as a wildlife biologist for the Bureau of Land Management. During her career, she published in academic journals, wrote numerous grant applications and reports and a variety of marketing materials. She now she writes about the Four Corners region, where she claims she meets the most fascinating people, who are always willing to share their stories. Her publications have won awards from the New Mexico Press Women. She currently lives in northwest New Mexico with her husband, where Vicky writes and enjoys photographing the flora and fauna that reside in her “back yard” which she considers any place within a mile walk.