Forensic anthropologist Erica Braxton, Joshua's daughter and a quadriplegic, downs a lethal barbituate in the opening scene of Gabriel's Covenant. Forty-five minutes later Frau Schroder, a registered anesthetist in Zurich, pronounces her dead. Joshua could have stopped the killing . . . her assisted suicide. He chooses not to. Why? There is an answer. It's buried inside Joshua and becomes curiously tangled in the history of Gabriel's Crossing, a rural...