Book description
Kanab, Utah is bitterly divided by the politics of land management.
When environmentalist David Greenbriar is found dead, County Sheriff,
Charley Sutter, seeks help from newly appointed Law Enforcement Ranger,
J. D. Books. Books discovers that the victim's widow has been having an
affair with Lance Clayburn. Physical evidence links Clayburn to the
killing. Books connects Greenbriar's murder to a corrupt Kane County
Sheriff's deputy and a Las Vegas business conglomerate with ties to
organized crime. Enter Peter Deluca, a very dangerous mob contract
killer, who will eliminate anyone who can link him or his employer to
Greenbriar's murder. Utah attracts eco-terrorists, free-range ranchers
and one very determined assassin. Returning to his hometown of Kanab,
Utah, as a ranger for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), former Denver
cop J. D. Books catches a homicide on the first day of his new job.
David Greenbriar, the force behind the Escalante Environmental
Wilderness Alliance (EEWA), has been shot dead while returning from a
hike on the Kaiparowitz Plateau, then strung up in a barn on an
abandoned Western movie set. Don't cry for his pretty young widow, who
has a lover to console her and a former lover who got her pregnant
several months ago. Was the homicide provoked by romance, or by
Greenbriar's obsession with stymieing road expansion in the southern
Utah wilderness? Working with Sheriff Charley Sutter and Chief Deputy
Brian Call, Books locates a sole witness, but not before someone inside
the investigation leaks information that causes the witness to take a
powder and a Vegas hit man to appear. More die. The mole is uncovered.
Vegas mobsters make threats. Clearly Books and the assassin are on a
collision course that will end with one of them wounded and the other
one dead. Too many dangling ends and melodramatic riffs to have the lean
appeal of Norman's neatly turned police procedurals (The Commission,
2007, etc.). But Books is a likable hero. MICHAEL NORMAN is a writer
and retired journalism professor who lives in an absolutely unhaunted
house near the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Beth Scott, who
died in early 1994, was full-time freelance writer for more than
thirty-five years.
