Rattle Snake Lodge – Diary of a Seeing Woman is a first-person narrative told by Amanda French, a woman money market trader in New York who goes to Texas in the 1980s when the interest rate yield curve was inverted and off shore trading was beginning to dominate the cash trading markets.

She pitches the Governor of Texas on a laddered program that would invest the proceeds from a 100-million-dollar state revenue bond that will return more than 2% over any other program. While she is waiting in the courtroom where the Governor agrees to meet with her, she meets Reed Petty, a local banker.

She has a brief and unexpected affair with the banker and teaches him her program.

She does not understand that the banker has been invited to pirate her program. She does not understand southern cronyism and she loses the trade to the banker, and eventually she loses her job.

Many years later, after some personal losses, she ends up in Santa Salsa, the small town in Texas where the banker is mayor and thinking about running for governor. When he runs into her, he attempts to reignite what once was. He is convinced that she can help him win the election. She is hesitant because she knows what he is capable of and she equates marrying him to sleeping with the devil.

A social worker, she works with the disadvantaged, mostly undocumented workers, the wives and the women left behind when the Mexican workers are sent back to Mexico. She builds a business for the women that consists of worms, vermin-composting. She teaches the women to convert trash into black gold, the most fertile soil, that she sells back to the stores at a very high profit, which pays for the home she and the women will build to house the women and their homeless children.

The old guard in town tries to run her out of it, to tax her and to malign her, and names her company Rattle Snake Lodge.

When Banker Petty proposes marriage, she is in a quandary because she can do good for the people with the governor behind her but he is a malevolent character. He nearly convinces her to take the ring when she is called away suddenly because one of the children in the barrio is missing. After two days and searches throughout the town, she learns that there is a figure, the Padrone, an old man who drives through the barrio giving trinkets to the girls. He had been seen recently, but the women don’t know who he is.

In the morning, as she is leaving through the garage of his magnificent home, she hits the garage door opener and impaled on the grill of his 4-wheel is the little boy, Jesus, dead.

If she had not seen it, the crime, albeit an accident, would never be discovered and revealed. Banker Petty would never be prosecuted and would run and probably win the race for Governor of Texas.