Every married couple knows you don't go to bed angry. The corollary, Cork O'Connor realizes, is that you also don't say goodbye when you're mad. When the charter plane Jo O'Connor is on crashes over the mountains in Wyoming in an early winter storm, Cork deeply regrets the heated argument he had with his wife just before she left. An intense search is launched, but bad weather and the steep terrain hinder the efforts and soon the search is abandoned.

Several months later, still grieving, Cork is contacted by the wife of the man who owned and flew the charter plane. An unlawful death suit has been filed against the pilot's estate alleging that he had been drinking the night before the flight disappeared and his ability to fly the plane was impaired. But credible evidence suggests he was not flying the plane that crashed. And if he didn't fly the plane into the storm, then who did?

Soon, Cork is pulled deep into a dangerous web of corruption that takes him to the rugged, isolated outback of Wyoming and forces him into deadly confrontations with law officers on the take and murderous drug lords who create 'safe havens' on Indian lands along the porous borders of the United States. But in the midst of the danger and deception lies the possibility that Jo's disappearance was not the end of her, that somewhere along the labyrinthine path of his search, maybe even in the broad shadow of Heaven's Keep itself, Cork will find her alive and waiting for him.