Book excerpt: Chicana detective Gloria Damasco has a ñdark gift,î an extrasensory prescience that underscores her investigations and compels her to solve numerous cases. This time, the recurring vision haunting her dreams contains two pairs of dark eyes watching her in the night, a phantom horse and rider, and the voice of a woman pleading for help. But most disquieting of all is GloriaÍs sensation of being trapped underwater, unable to free herself, unable to breathe. When Gloria is asked to help the owners of the Oro Blanco winery in CaliforniaÍs Shenandoah Valley, she finds herself on the road to the legendary Gold Country. And she canÍt help but wonder if the ever-more persistent visions might foreshadow this new case that involves the theft of a family heirloom, a pair of antique diamond and emerald earrings rumored to have belonged to MexicoÍs Empress Carlota. Soon Gloria learns that thereÍs more to the case than stolen jewelry. Mysterious accidents, threatening anonymous notes, the disappearance of a woman believed to be a saint, and a ghost horse thought to have belonged to notorious bandit JoaquÕn Murrieta are some of the pieces Gloria struggles to fit together. A womanÍs gruesome murder and the discovery of a group of young women from Mexico being held against their will in an abandoned house send Gloria on a fateful journey to a WitchesÍ Sabbath to find the final pieces of the puzzle before someone else is killed. Corpi weaves the rich cultural history of CaliforniaÍs Gold Country with a suspenseful mystery in this latest installment in the Gloria Damasco Mystery series.