Laid back Deputy Sheriff Spider Latham takes a job moonlighting as a private investigator. Even though he’s loath to leave his wife, Laurie, with his Alzheimer’s-stricken mother, he takes the job because they need the money.

He must travel to Eastern Washington to find out how and why the owner’s son-in-law disappeared returning from the Snakewater Mine.

Once there, Spider faces suspicion, resentment, a cougar, and a maniac on a backhoe as he works to unravel the mystery. Suspects, motives and opportunities abound, and just as Spider gets it all unsnarled and heads home to help with his failing mother, everything tangles up again. Even the owner is now suspect.

Spider is constrained to put his personal needs aside to finish the job, but does he dare when his mother is so close to death? And how can he possibly proceed when he doesn’t know whom he can trust?