Roiling conflict, budding romance, and rip-roaring adventure all collide in this novel. Renowned rabble-rouser Jim Kendric is making his way back to town, and the entire community -- including one widely coveted young woman -- is bracing itself for the impact of his arrival. A tale of Aztec treasure--of American adventurers who seek it--of Zoraida, who protects it.

Roiling conflict, budding romance, and rip-roaring adventure all collide in this novel. Renowned rabble-rouser Jim Kendric is making his way back to town, and the entire community -- including one widely coveted young woman -- is bracing itself for the impact of his arrival. A tale of Aztec treasure--of American adventurers who seek it--of Zoraida, who protects it.

While researching an heirloom gold cross in New York City, clues emerge pointing to the location of a lost treasure Cortés stole from the Aztecs. Gideon Riot, his wife Carmelita, Molly, a sweet looking but hardened cowgirl from Tucson, and Sofie, a historian from the New York library travel to México and search for this elusive cache. Their search takes them from New York to an historic church in Tucson and further to a tiny island in México during the early uprisings of their Revolution. The quartet face unimaginable hazards from other treasure hunters, revolutionaries, and a spy in their midst. The Lost Treasure of Cortés is a story of and the incredible turmoil along the U.S./Mexican border at the height of the Mexican revolution, and a search for the lost Aztec treasure.

Here are tales of fabulous advances made in anthropology, archaeology, astronomy, and linguistics, stories of the Anasazi, the "old ones" of the southwestern desert, of the great explorers, eccentrics, dreamers, scientists, cranks, and geniuses. "There's no end to the list, of course," Connell says, "because gradually it descends from such legendary individuals to ourselves when, as children, obsessed by that same urge, we got permission to sleep in the backyard."