On a windswept landscape somewhere north of Denver, Robert Hawks, a feisty and dangerously curious hydrologist, finds himself enmeshed in a fight over Native American treaty rights. What begins for Robert as a peaceful fishing interlude, ends in murder and the disclosure of government secrets.

Why was the impossibly short Louise Yellow Calf hitching a ride on a snowy, deserted road following the discovery of two FBI agents murdered on the reservation? And what is the female FBI agent doing in Robert's shower? As our reluctant hero fits together the pieces in the all too rapidly unfolding drama, connections emerge to his own family's long-standing civil rights battles-- battles that he has thus far managed to avoid.

InWatershed, Percival Everett has created an original mystery that crackles with tension and sly wit. Robert Hawks is revealed as someone who has been indelibly defined by the history of our country's racial relationships, and the one man uniquely qualified to take us with him through this complex and contested territory.