Motherboard (ePub)

Claire Hamilton, 34, is an executive for a start-up and lives with her San Francisco boyfriend, Nelson Longstreet, who works from home on his laptop computer because he is a high IQ geek with an insatiable curiosity about everything. He is long on brains and short on tact, but Claire finds his quirkiness interesting and funny. Claire lost both parents, her mother recently, and has been in therapy with Rebecca Calhoun, PhD.

On a Monday morning just before an office meeting Claire receives a phone call from Roberta Thompson of Social Services in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who informs Claire that her "older sister, Rowena Cooper" and her Apache husband have been murdered and that her "5-year-old niece, Blossom," must come to live with her as the only remaining relative of Blossom.

Shocked, and certain this must be a crank call, Claire insists she doesn't have a sister and social services calmly sets her straight: Claire's mother, before marrying her father and while in college, attended the protest in South Dakota at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1973 and fell in love with an Apache. She gave birth to a baby, Rowena, later Blossom's mother, and gave up Rowena for adoption to be raised by the father's elder aunt and husband who lived on the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico.

With Blossom in tow, Claire and Nelson's predictable future swiftly upends. They embark on a dangerous and circuitous path, with the help of a band of eccentric professionals from Berkeley, that takes them into the wild environs of the native American southwest culture where casino owners, dangerous cartel drug dealers from Mexico, and other interested parties all want to get their hands on Blossom. And no one really knows why.