Gray Dominion - Softcover

Sylvia and Kath, two active, gray-haired women, one a widowed artist, and the other an autistic intellectual, put down their paint brush, binoculars, and guidebook projects to investigate mysterious happenings in Yellowstone Park. Along the way, they encounter the deep conflict that exists in the park between preservation and public access, since humans have supplanted the gray wolf as top predator of the domain. They, their friends and family, become embroiled in the local controversies between individual liberty and balancing the ecosystem, while the overlapping dominions of state, federal, and local agencies further complicate matters, forcing them to contend with the authority of young park rangers, the local sheriff, and the FBI to solve a murder conspiracy that leads all the way to the governor’s mansion.

Pamelia Barratt has lived on both the east and west coasts of the United States. She grew up in Chicago, summered in Wisconsin, lived for extended periods of time in Switzerland and Britain, and volunteered for ten years with a development nonprofit that works in the high Andes of Bolivia. After a career as a high school chemistry teacher, she became a journalist in San Diego, and then discovered the thrill of writing fiction. Her first novel, Blood: the Color of Cranberries, was published in 2009. It was followed by An Ostentation two years later. Gray Dominion is her third mystery. “My hodgepodge background has offered a great source of characters and situations to draw on for storytelling. Birds and nature continually renew my spirits,” Pamelia says. It’s no wonder that creatures of the wild assume important roles in her stories.