Coyote Crossing

Valentina Rides Solo

Tina rides a motorcycle, packs a sharp knife, speaks 26 languages and won’t take “no” for an answer in any of them. Her undercover passport reads Valentina Corazón from Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, but in reality she’s a U.S. secret agent tracking Border Patrol corruption and the increasingly violent narco-traffickers along the Mexico border. Her grandfather was a Navajo Code Talker in WWII. Her father was an electronics specialist in Viet Nam who rose to cabinet-level secret agency status with the Udall brothers after Bobby Kennedy got tired of J. Edgar Hoover and the CIA pushing his big brother Jack around. Now she's a Navajo/Vietnamese linguist and cryptographer who went undercover in Kuwait ("Put on a burqa and they all ignore you.") facing her biggest challenge: infiltrating the crooked underworld on both sides of the Nogales border after her predecessor was murdered. Valentina Nguyen-Desjardins-Toledo—a new heroine in an agency so secret the U.S. government doesn’t even know it exists. The bad guys are about to find out.
This debut novel is by Phil Baechler, a journalist, inventor and longtime Arizona resident.