The Wild West

The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle - A breathtaking and beautiful novel set on a horse ranch in small-town Colorado. (March 2008)

The Shape Shifter by Tony Hillerman - Retirement has never sat well with former Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn. Now the ghosts of a still-unsolved case are returning to haunt him, reawakened by a photograph in a magazine spread of a one-of-a-kind Navajo rug, a priceless work of woven art that was supposedly destroyed in a suspicious fire many years earlier. The rug, commemorating one of the darkest and most terrible chapters in American history, was always said to be cursed, and now the friend who brought it to Leaphorn's attention has mysteriously gone missing. (December 2007)

Stone Butterfly by James D. Ross - 11th Charlie Moon mystery. Daisy Perika is no stranger to eerie dreams, but when she has a nightmare, lives could be at stake. Convinced that her visions of a wisp-thin girl with blood dripping from her hands are omens, the old woman calls on her nephew, Charlie Moon. A part-time tribal investigator and full-time Colorado rancher, Moon is often skeptical of his aunt's mystical ways. And this time, much as he wants to believe her, Daisy just can't get a clear vision of the girl's face. (October 2007)

The Unquiet Grave: The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country by Steve Hendricks (August 2007)

Telegraph Days by Larry McMurtry - Western lore with a wry smile. (April 2007)

The Road by Cormac McCarthy (March 2007)

Mourning Dove by Aimee and David Thurlo - 12th Ella Clah, Navajo Tribal Police Special Investigator, mystery. (March 2007)

Midnight Cactus by Bella Pollen - A stirring and suspenseful tale of love and the quest for freedom, vividly set in the wild lands between Arizona and the Mexican border. (February 2007)

The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy - (January 2007)

The Night Journal by Elizabeth Crook - At age 37, Meg Mabry, a single, overworked medical engineer, still hasn't found her place in the world, a predicament due in part to her rejection of her heritage. She's the great-granddaughter of Hannah Bass, a woman whose journals about frontier life in New Mexico (dating 1891 to 1902) have become famous thanks to Meg's grandmother Claudia Bass (Bassie), a historian who built her career promoting the diaries. (January 2007)

The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich - Reasoning that the drum—found among a white family's possessions—was "stolen from our own people," Faye Travers, a middle-aged divorcee, absconds with it, then travels west with her mother, Elsie, to the Ojibwe reservation to which they'll return it. (September 2006)

The Hot Kid by Elmore Leonard - Set in 1930's Oklahoma against a backdrop of moonshine, speakeasies, mine strikes, oil wildcatters, gangsters, gun molls, prostitutes and plenty of bank robberies. (September 2006)

The Killings of Stanley Ketchel by James Carlos Blake (July 2006)

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy - Seven years after Cities of the Plain brought his acclaimed Border Trilogy to a close, McCarthy returns with a mesmerizing modern-day western. (July 2006)

Mining California: An Ecological History by Andrew C. Isenberg - Between 1849 and 1874 almost $1 billion in gold was mined in California. With little available capital or labor, here’s how: high-pressure water cannons washed hillsides into sluices that used mercury to trap gold but let the soil wash away; eventually more than three times the amount of earth moved to make way for the Panama Canal entered California’s rivers, leaving behind twenty tons of mercury every mile. In the rush to wealth, the same chain of foreseeable consequences reduced California’s forests and grasslands. Beautifully told, this is western environmental history at its finest. (July 2006)

The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and the Beginnings of Superstardom in America by Larry McMurtry - (May 2006)

Thief in Retreat by Aimee & David Thurlo - At a former monastery, closed and sold by the diocese and now operating as a hotel and business retreat, there are a series of mysterious goings on. (May 2006)

The Wild Girl: Notebooks of Ned Giles, 1932 by Jim Fergus - When Ned Giles is orphaned as a teenager, he heads West hoping to leave his troubles behind. He joins the 1932 Great Apache Expedition on their search for a young boy, the son of a wealthy Mexican landowner, who was kidnapped by wild Apaches. But the expedition's goal is complicated when they encounter a wild Apache girl in a Mexican jail cell, victim of a Mexican massacre of her tribe that has left her orphaned and unwilling to eat or speak. Based on historical fact. (April 2006)