Posted: Friday, November 14, 2008 12:00 am
'Blackbird Farewell'
By Robert Greer
Published by Frog Books, 338 pages, $25.95 Hardcover, October 2008
This is different approach to Western literature. It has little to do with mountain streams or prairie winds.
Instead, it's about the Denver Nuggets, points shaving and performance enhancement drugs.
"Blackbird Farewell" is the latest in Robert Greer's C.J. Floyd mysteries, a series about a sometimes private investigator who always seems to find himself entangled too deeply in unfortunate circumstances.
While the stories are all set to the backdrop of the Rocky Mountains - and to the Western ethos of its landscape - Greer often inserts Floyd into broader cultural events, creating mysteries that lead back to Vietnam to the JFK assassination, for example.
But in this book, it's Floyd's godson, Damion Madrid, who gets to play detective.
While Floyd celebrates his vacation in Hawaii, Madrid's best friend, Shandell "Blackbird" Bird, is murdered. Blackbird had just been drafted by the Denver Nuggets and deposited a $4 million check in his bank from a shoe endorsement deal.
Madrid and Blackbird were basketball buddies, almost leading their college team to the NCAA championship. Almost.
Was Blackbird killed over rumors that he gave away the final game? Or was he trying to hide a more sinister secret?
Greer is the author of six other C.J. Floyd mysteries, a collection of short stories, "Isolation and Other Stories," and two medical thrillers. He is Chester Himes Award winner and founder of "High Plains Literary Review." He reviews books for National Public Radio and is a professor of pathology and medicine at Colorado School of Medicine. He lives in Denver but owns a cattle ranch near Wheatland where he spends part of his time.
Visit www.robertgreerbooks.com.
'People of the Thunder'
By W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear
Forge Books, 384 pages, $25.95 hardcover, January 2009
What great culture and civilization dominated Europe two thousand years ago?
That's easy. Rome.
OK, so what great civilization flourished in the Eastern United States and Canada two thousand years ago?
What? No answer?
Try this one: What was the biggest city in England in 1300? London.
Good. Now, what was the biggest city in what is now the United States in 1300?
Sorry, but you are out of lifelines.
It's a sad truth that more Americans know more about Europe in pre-Columbian days than they know about their own country. That's why the Gears, husband and wife, write.
Both are award-winning archaeologists and best-selling authors determined to introduce Americans to our forgotten past. They do it through sweeping novels that meld read archaeological findings with dramatic narrative and Native American traditions.
"One of the reasons we write these books is that we hope people will make that leap to understand that prehistoric peoples were not running savages.They were human begins just like you and I, who loved and cried and died," said Kathleen O'Neal Gear.
Their latest novel, "People of the Thunder," won't be out in time for Christmas. But fans can always stuff a rain check in a stocking.
By 1300, the Sky Hand people had built their high-walled capital, Split Sky City, in what is now the state of Alabama. But to do it, they used brutal force and slavery against their enemies.
And now, great armies are on the march against the brutal capital. Can a new leader, Smoke Shield, be able to topple the great city?
"People of the Thunder," and its companion book, "People of the Weeping Eye" (April 2008), are based on Alabama's Moundville archaeological site. Today, the park is known for grassy mounds and ravines above the Black Warrior River.
Between 1200 and 1380, Moundville was the largest urban center in North America and was a capital for people who lived in central Alabama and western Mississippi. The stories built around this history explore traditions of Chickasaw, Alabama, Choctaw, and Yuchi culture.
The remnants of a great and complicated culture, one that is often taught in our schools as a study of the American Indian Wars, are under our feet in America.
W. Michael Gears has a master's degree in anthropology and has worked for 20 years a professional archaeologist in the west. Kathleen O'Neal Gear has a master's in history and has two Special Achievement Awards from the Department of the Interior for her archeology work with the Bureau of Land Management.
The two live on a range near Thermopolis and have sold millions of books and are USA Today best-selling authors.
"Shin Deep: A Fly Fisher's Love for Living Water"
By Chris Hunt
Published by CreateSpace, 138 pages, $16.99 paperback, August 2008
It took a lot for Chris Hunt and his companions to get to the river - two blown tires to be precise - but they eventually got there.
And when they got there, Hunt described the Wyoming Range this way: "An hour later, both vehicles were parked at a trailhead leading into the Wyoming Range backcountry, and the rainbows, brookies and cutthroats of North Piney Creek were slamming bushy dry flies as they floated happily over likely runs. For the first time since assuming pit crew duties the day before, Mike and I were able to appreciate the Wyoming Range for what it was, not for what it meant to others.
"Veined by dozens of glorious little trout streams, from one end to the other, the range is a signature Wyoming Territory. Snow-flecked mountaintops loom over lush alpine meadows teeming with deer, elk, grouse and the West's most robust population of moose. There, away from the killer gravel roads, Mike and I spent an afternoon in paradise."
On that particular trip, Hunt, who works fro Trout Unlimited, was showing a group of reporters the merits of the range on behalf of Sportsmen for the Wyoming Range. His fishing almost got cut short by the tire-eating gravel roads.
In this book, Hunt describes other fishing trips as he wades "shin deep" in waters across the west. His are not sentimental yarns meant to stir deeply hidden passions. Instead, through the simplicity of the act itself - fishing in flowing water - Hunt makes a case of protecting the West's most precious resource: its land.
Many fisherman will find a story to relate to in this collection.
Available at Amazon.com
'The Better to Eat You With'
By Joel Berger
The University of Chicago Press, 305 pages, $29 hardcover, November 2008
Three years after wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park, Joel Berger crouched beneath the cold grandeur of the Teton Range. He watched as a few members of a wolf pack approached a herd of elk.
And the elk didn't care.
It had been 60 years since wolves had disappeared from the ecosystem. And the elk now grazing on the prairie had never been taught to fear the stealthy killers.
For hundreds of millennia, wolves had hunted and killed elk. But the elk had forgotten it in just over six decades.
"The Better to Eat You With: Fear in the Animal World" is a study of the role fear plays in the natural world. From Yellowstone, Berger's study has taken him to Africa to study the affects of lions on the prey they feed on and to Asia where moose, tigers and bears coexist.
Berger is a John J. Craighead Professor of Wildlife Conservation at the University of Montana.
'Where Law Ends'
By Kevin Emmet Foley
Pronghorn Press, 411 pages, $21.95 hardcover; 2008
In 1863, the Montana Vigilantes, are said to have taken a stand against a corrupt Sheriff who had terrorized the gold mining camps along Alder Gulch and Grasshopper Creek.
The legend says that the Sheriff and his band of outlaws hunted down accused criminals and judged them on the spot, hanging those they determined to be guilty.
The Vigilantes, according to the legend, were heroes.
But what if the tides were turned. If history is written by the victorious, could the Vigilantes have created a legend to gloss over their own bloody history?
Kevin Emmet Foley's "Where Law Ends," is a mix of fact and fiction. Set in the Montana Rockies, it tells the story behind the real men who hang Sheriff Henry Plummer through the eyes of a fictional protagonist, a naive New York newspaper man.