Bad Country

Winner of the Tony Hillerman prize, winner of the Spur Award for Best Western Contemporary Novel, and a finalist for a Shamus and an 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. Retired from the rodeo circuit and scraping by on piecework as a bounty hunter, warrant server, and divorce snoop, he doesn t have much choice but to say yes when hired to solve the murder of an Indian teenager, whose death is part of a mysterious rompecabeza a classic crime puzzler that includes multiple killings, cold-blooded betrayals, and low-down scheming, with Rodeo caught in the middle.

Winner of the Spur Award for Best Western Contemporary Novel and a finalist for the Edgar and Shamus awards for Best First Novel, "Bad Country" is a noir novel that is as deep and twisty as a desert arroyo. With confident, accomplished prose, CB McKenzie captures the rough-and-tumble outer reaches of the Southwest in a transfixingly original style that transcends the traditional crime novel."