Dead Man’s Curse – Paperback

For forty years, Hank Mercer chased a dying man’s whisper: a mountain in Mexico’s Sierra Madre called El Tecolote, the Owl, where Aztec priests hid the last of Moctezuma’s gold in 1520 and bound it with a curse. Hank gave up the hunt for the wife he loved. Then, eleven months after her funeral, a map drawn in blood falls out of her Bible.

Hank rides north with his oldest friend Clyde, a skeptical geologist armed with LiDAR, and a cocky young climbing guide. They carry metal detectors, thermal drones, and satellite phones. None of it prepares them for what waits beyond the ancient stone markers: drums that beat beneath the earth and stop when you speak, horses that stare at the mountain all night, a voice from the river calling a dead mother’s pet name, and a carved stone that loses one notch every time a man dies.

The mountain gives each of them exactly what he wants. Then it collects.

Dead Man’s Curse is a supernatural thriller about greed, grief, and the price of the one thing you promised you would let go.