HE’S CALLING IN BACKUP As the law in Rodeo, Montana, Sheriff Cole Payette can handle just about anything. Taking in his orphaned niece and nephew, though, puts him out of his depth. Grief-stricken himself, Cole turns to bar owner Honey Armstrong. Cole’s longtime crush on Honey has always made him tongue-tied, but now she’s the only one he can ask for help. Honey is shocked by Cole’s request. He rarely says two words to her and now he needs her to help care for the children? She’s willing to pitch in, but bonding with the kids starts to feel a lot like being a family. And that’s not something Honey has ever let herself dream about—no matter how tempting Cole is…
In the American imagination, no figure is more central to national identity and the nation’s origin story than the cowboy. Yet the Americans and Europeans who settled the U.S. West learned virtually everything they knew about ranching from the indigenous and Mexican horsemen who already inhabited the region. The charro—a skilled, elite, and landowning horseman—was an especially powerful symbol of Mexican masculinity and nationalism. After the 1930s, Mexican Americans in cities across the U.S. West embraced the figure as a way to challenge their segregation, exploitation, and marginalization from core narratives of American identity. In this definitive history, Laura R. Barraclough shows how Mexican Americans have used the charro in the service of civil rights, cultural citizenship, and place-making. Focusing on a range of U.S. cities, Charros traces the evolution of the “original cowboy” through mixed triumphs and hostile backlashes, revealing him to be a crucial agent in the production of U.S., Mexican, and border cultures, as well as a guiding force for Mexican American identity and social movements.
What happens when a tenacious sheriff takes on a determined cowgirl and her champion bull? It’s never easy to make it in a man’s world, and cowgirl Tori Tremayne has chased the same dream most of her life—producing a champion bucking bull on the pro rodeo circuit. With her prize bull Maximus, she’s so close to winning top prize in the finals this year she can taste it. She can’t afford any distractions, especially not the tall, dark and swoony sheriff she’s admired all her life. Sheriff Gray Dalton has been in love with Tori since they were kids. He doesn’t want to change Tori or derail her goals, but he does want to combine their dreams—build a life and family with her while she continues to pursue her career and passion. Gray knows he has to shake Tori up so that he can step out of the friend zone she’s so determined to keep him in. Can Gray prove to Tori that with him she can have it all—career, love and a family?
Tom Lacey and Samuel Embers were outlaws who split from the Younger Brothers Gang. Their handles were the Nevada Kid and Smokey. After the robbery of the Kingston-Downey Express, they took honest jobs while seeking refuge at a prominent cattle ranch. Tom had been shot through the left thigh, and taking on honest jobs was the only way Smokey could get his partner back on his feet again without getting captured. When returning to the O'Connor ranch from a cattle drive up north, they had no idea their cover was revealed to the local sheriff. They were arrested, tried, and convicted to prison terms. Smokey was released after five years, but Tom Lacey (the Nevada Kid) had to stay an extra two for misbehavior. What got Nevada the two extra years was his stubbornness and his bad-boy attitude. It was his sour venom that got him in there in the first place--that along with his love, respect, and damned cursed weakness for beautiful women. In book 3 of the Southwest Series, the Nevada Kid and Smokey are released from prison. Nevada heads southwest and joins the Broken Arrow Ranch rodeo circuit to make some fast money, hoping to reach the goal he set for himself of buying a cattle ranch. What kind of trouble does he get into there with his new friend Recordina "Ricki," the barrel racer? Who is cutting cinch straps, trying to cause a planned murder to look like an accident?
The rodeo arena is always treacherous. Now it’s deadly… It’s no accident Deputy Tessa McKade is trapped with an angry bull ready to trample her to death. She quickly realizes that McKade Law is no longer enough to keep her safe—and it’s her rescuer, Braden Hayes, who stands in as her bodyguard. As they seek to stop a would-be killer, Braden will have to use all his professional skills to guard Tessa’s life.
Winner of the Tony Hillerman Prize Winner of the Spur Award for Best Western Contemporary Novel Finalist for the Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel Finalist for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel 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.
