Summary: The
newest winner of the Tony Hillerman Prize, a debut mystery set in the Southwest
starring a former rodeo cowboy turned private investigator, told in a
transfixingly original style.
Rodeo Grace Garnet lives with his old dog in a remote corner of Arizona known
to locals as El Hoyo. He doesn't get many visitors in
The Hole, but a body found near his home has drawn police attention to his
front door. The victim is not one of the many undocumented immigrants who risk
their lives to cross the border in Rodeo's harsh and deadly "backyard,"
but a member of a major Southwestern Indian tribe, whose death is part of a
mysterious rompecabeza—a classic crime puzzler—that includes
multiple murders, cold-blooded betrayals, and low-down scheming, with Rodeo
caught in the middle.
Retired
from the rodeo circuit and scraping by on piecework as a bounty hunter, warrant
server, and divorce snoop, Rodeo doesn't have much choice but to say yes when
offered an unusual case. An elderly Indian woman from his own
Reservation has hired him to help discover who murdered her grandson, but
she seems strangely uninterested in the results. Her attitude seems heartless,
but as Rodeo pursues interrelated cases, he learns that the old woman's
indifference is nothing compared to true hatred, and aligned against a variety
of creative and cruel foes, the hard-pressed PI is about to discover just how
far hate can go.
CB McKenzie's Bad Country is a noir novel that is as deep and
twisty as a desert arroyo. With confident, accomplished prose, McKenzie
captures the rough-and-tumble outer reaches of the Southwest in a transfixingly
original style that transcends the traditional crime novel.
Angie's Comments: Fantastic
book! The mystery is interesting, but the writing is great. The characters are
well developed, and each has his or her own problems. If you are looking for a
cozy mystery, this is not the book for you. If you read Tony Hillerman or love
books set in the Southwest, this book is for you! The book doesn’t use
quotation marks when someone is talking, so that makes it a little harder to
read at the beginning. However, the lack of quotation marks makes the character’s
voices flow with the description.
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