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New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Lowell has more than eighty titles published to date with over twenty-four million copies of her books in print. She lives in the Sierra Nevada Mountains with her husband, with whom she writes novels under a pseudonym. Her favorite activity is exploring the Western United States to find the landscapes that speak to her soul and inspire her writing.

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With her trademark electrifying storytelling and razor-sharp tension, New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Lowell proves once again why she is one of today's top masters of suspense -- in a riveting tale of dark family secrets ready to explode with the devastating force of a Southwestern earthquake.

The powerful Quintrell family of New Mexico has spent decades in the public eye. Now the recent death of the clan's patriarch, a former U.S. senator, has placed his son, Governor Josh Quintrell, squarely in the spotlight as he prepares his run for the highest political office in the land. It is not a good time to be rattling skeletons in the family's closets.

Researching personal histories isn't just Carolina "Carly" May's profession, it's her passion. When the governor's eccentric Aunt Winifred invites Carly into the Quintrells' private Taos compound to compile a genealogical record of the illustrious residents, she can hardly believe her good luck. But digging into the past is raising troubling questions about the would-be president's private life, his late father and catatonic mother, and the grisly street crime that left his notorious drug-addicted sister dead. And it soon becomes frighteningly apparent that the motivation of the dotty old woman who hired Carly might be something more akin to revenge -- and that someone is determined to remove the inquisitive genealogist from the picture by any means necessary.

As a dark world of twisted passions and depraved crimes slowly opens up before Carly, she realizes that there is no one whom she dares to trust -- perhaps least of all Dan Duran, a dangerous and haunted mystery man who's somehow tied to the Quintrells' past. But she will need an ally to survive the terrible secrets a father carried to the grave and an even more devastating evil that lurks among the living -- because following the bloodlines of the wealthy and power-hungry can be a bloody business ... and some dead secrets can kill.

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Always Time to Die

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

Near Taos
Sunday Morning

Two men squinted against the wind and stared down at the Quintrell family graveyard. It lay a few hundred yards below and six hundred feetaway from the base of the long, ragged ridge where they stood. A whitewrought-iron fence enclosed the graveyard, as though death could bekept away from the living by such a simple thing.

At the edge of the valley, piñons grew black against a thin veneer of snow. Cottonwood branches along the valley creek had been strippedby winter to their thin, pale skin. In the black-and-white landscape, aragged rectangle and a nearby tarp-covered mound of loose red dirtlooked out of place. Three ravens squatted on the tarp like guests waitingto be served. A polished casket hovered astride the newly dug grave,ready to be lowered at a signal from the minister.

The first of the funeral procession drove up and stopped outside theornate white fence. There wouldn't be many cars, because the gravesideservice was limited to clergy and immediate members of the Senator'sfamily. The public service had been yesterday, in Santa Fe,complete with a media circus where the famous and the merely notoriousexchanged Cheshire cat grins and firm handshakes and careful lieswhile the smell of dying flowers overwhelmed the stately cathedral.

Automatically Daniel Duran looked over his shoulder, checking thathis silhouette was still invisible from below, lost against a tall pine. Itwas. So was his father's.

He and John weren't famous or notorious. They hadn't been invitedto either the memorial or funeral service for the dead man everyonecalled the Senator. The lack of invitations didn't matter to Dan. Hewouldn't have gone anyway.

So why am I here?

It was a good question. He didn't have an answer. He wasn't evensure he wanted one.

The wind rushing down from the harsh peaks of the Sangre deCristo Mountains tasted of snow and distance and the kind of time thatmade most people uncomfortable. Deep time. Unimaginable time.Time so great it reduced humanity to an amusing footnote in Earth'sfour-billion-year history.

Dan liked that kind of time. Humans were amusing. Laughable. Itwas the only way to stay sane.

And that was something he'd promised himself he wouldn't thinkabout for a few months. Staying sane.

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, chances areyou don't understand the situation. Why else would ignorance be called bliss?

With a grim smile he turned so that his injured leg didn't take theforce of the brutal wind.

"You should have stayed hom e," John Duran said.

Dan gave his father a sidelong look. "The exercise is good formy leg."

"That old man never acknowledged you or your mother as kin. Hell,he barely acknowledged his own legitimate daughter."

Dan shrugged and let the wind comb dark hair he hadn't bothered tohave cut in months. "I don't take it personally. He never acknowledgedany of his bastards."

"So why bother hiking here for the Senator's funeral? And don'twaste your breath on the exercise excuse. You could do laps around theTaos town square with a lot less trouble."

For a time there was only the sound of the ice-tipped wind scouringthe ridge. Finally Dan said, "I don't know."

John grunted. He doubted that his fiercely bright son didn't knowwhy they were freezing their nuts off on Castillo Ridge watching one of New Mexico's most famous womanizers get buried. Then again,maybe Dan truly didn't know.

"You sure?" John asked.

"Yeah."

"Well, that's the most hopeful thing that's happened since youturned up three months ago."

Once, Dan would have smiled, but that was before pain had etchedhis face and cynicism had eroded his soul. "How so?"

"You cared about something enough to walk three miles in the snow."

Dan's dark brown eyebrows lifted. "Have I been that bad?"

"No," his father said slowly. "But you're different. Much less smile.Toomuch steel. Less laughter.More silence. Too old to be thirty-four."

Dan didn't argue. It was the truth.

"It's more than the injury," John said, waving at his son's right leg,where metal and pain had exploded through flesh. "Muscle and boneheals. Emotions . . ." He sighed. "Well, they take longer. And sometimesthey just don't heal at all."

"You're thinking of Mom and whatever happened with her mother."

John nodded. "She still doesn't talk about it."

"Good for her." I hope.

"You didn't feel that way a few years ago."

"A few years ago I didn't understand about sleeping dogs and landmines. Now I do."

And that's what was bothering Dan. The Senator's sister-in-lawWinifred was running around kicking sleeping dogs right and left.Sooner or later she would step on a land mine and wake up somethingso brutal that his own mother had never once spoken of it, even to theman she loved.

Silently the two men watched the shiny white hearse wait next to thegraveyard's wide gate. The couple in the rear seat, Josh Quintrell andhis wife Anne, waited for the driver to open their doors. Their son,A.J. V, called Andy, got out and turned his back to the windblown snow.When his parents stepped into the gray daylight, their clothes were asblack as the ravens perched on the graveside tarp.

A second car pulled up close to the hearse. As soon as it stopped, atall, lanky woman emerged into the bitter wind with just enough hesitationto show her age. The iron gray of her hair beneath a black lacemantilla marked her as Winifred Simmons y Castillo, sister-in-law tothe dead Senator, and a woman who in more than seven decades hadn'tfound a man -- or anything else -- she couldn't live without.

Continues...

Excerpted from Always Time to Dieby Elizabeth Lowell Copyright ©2005 by Elizabeth Lowell. Excerpted by permission.
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