Hozho

Phoenix, Arizona. One Thursday in September, Hunter Brooks walks into First Mesa Bank with his wife Maya to sign a mortgage. Armed men burst in. Maya is killed in the robbery. Their son Nataani is born via emergency C-section a few hours later. Hunter is a former SEAL Team Six member, a software developer, and a husband of six years. He finds himself alone with a newborn, a promise made to a dying woman, and the certainty that those responsible are somewhere in Phoenix. He does everything he's told not to do. By building a surveillance program from his apartment, infiltrating the bars of South Phoenix under the identity of Danny Brewer—a truck driver from Mesa, seven years in the Navy—and patiently tracing a criminal network back to its final links, Hunter builds a case that the FBI couldn't build on its own. Not because he's a hero. Because he has no other way to stay functional. But HÓZHÓ is not just a crime novel. It is the story of a man learning to carry what he carries. Learning the difference between searching and getting lost. Learning, from the funeral rites of Window Rock to the nights of surveillance in South Phoenix, what loss does to a man when he refuses to let it define him entirely. It is also the story of Nizhoni—Maya's younger sister, a social worker, a woman who had been waiting for months for Hunter to be ready to name what was developing between them. And of Chester, a Vietnam veteran and a man of few words, whose quiet certainty—we'll find them—is perhaps the most solid thing Hunter has encountered since Maya's death. A novel set over four months, from September to December 2023, on the streets of Phoenix and the Navajo Plateau. A novel about justice, grief, passing on, and the way some people practice hózhó—not by feeling balance, but by continuing to act toward it.