Melia Raymond is so eager to support her 17-year-old grandson, Droid, né Andrew Morgan, as he enters rehab for his addiction to alcohol and drugs that she tags along with him on the intake bus, allowing herself to be checked in for her own nonexistent addiction. Her decision is a serious mistake, since, under the stewardship of Beatrice Dottson, Best Way Health and Wellness is nothing but a scam designed to rake in government dollars for treatments it has no intention of providing. In fact, many of the guards who make sure the clients surrender their cell phones and stay put till Best Way is ready to turn them loose actively push more liquor on them. Their time-tested strategy doesn’t work for Droid, who promptly vanishes, leaving Mrs. Raymond to pair up with his widowed father, Greg Morgan, to search far and wide for him. Meanwhile, Officer Bernadette Manuelito of the Navajo Police faces a grave complication before the promised high-profile visit of U.S. Secretary of Energy Savanah Cooper: Members of Citizens United To Save the Planet, a ferocious activist group, have settled in at the elderly Yazzies’ property, building an illegal sweat lodge and planning what’s clearly going to be a criminal protest against the scourge of uranium extraction from Native lands. Since the two stories never intersect, their sum total is less a novel than a pair of novellas shuffled together in alternating chapters.
