Fiction

Yellowstone Standoff by Scott Graham
Book 3 in the National Park Mystery Series

When Yellowstone National Park’s grizzly bears and gray wolves suddenly and inexplicably go rogue, archaeologist Chuck Bender teams with his old friend, Yellowstone Chief Ranger Lex Hancock, to defend the suspect members of a group scientific expedition. Soon, Chuck finds himself defending the lives of his family as an unforeseen danger threatens deep in the storied national park’s remote wilderness.

Cold Blood, Hot Sea by Charlene D’Avanzo

When a colleague is killed aboard the research vessel Intrepid, oceanographer Mara Tusconi believes it’s no accident. As she investigates, Mara becomes entangled in a scheme involving powerful energy executives with much to lose if her department colleagues continue their climate change research. Mara’s career—and life—is on the line, threatened by intrigue as big and dark as the ocean.

Alibi Creek by Bev Magennis

Following a two-year prison stint, charming and wily Walker returns to his family’s New Mexico ranch, where his pious older sister Lee Ann is busy caring for their mother, raising two sons, and grappling with unethical workplace demands. As Walker’s reckless life careens into Lee Ann’s careful one, a drastic transformation of beliefs, identities, and relationships ensues.

Mountain Rampage by Scott Graham
Book 2 in the National Park Mystery Series

The anticipated second installment in the highly praised National Park Mystery Series, Mountain Rampage brings the rugged Rocky Mountain landscape, Colorado’s violent gold-mining past, and animal-poaching present vividly to life. Rampage provides readers an inside perspective into Rocky Mountain National Park and the fascinating world of professional archaeology with the return of archaeologist Chuck Bender.

Pale Harvest by Braden Hepner

Working a dying trade in a dead town, dairy farmer Jack Selvedge finds his life and existence stagnant. When Rebekah Rainsford moves back to town on the run from her father, her dark history consumes him. It soon becomes clear why girls like her don’t stay in towns like these, as elements of humanity in ruin culminate in tragedy. A deeply written and deeply felt story of love, depravity, and shattered ideals, Pale Harvest examines the loss of beauty, purity, and simplicity within the mindset of the rural American West.

Canyon Sacrifice by Scott Graham
Book One in the National Park Mystery Series

In Tony Hillerman fashion, this page-turner brings the rugged western landscape, the mysterious past of the ancient Anasazi Indians, and the Southwest’s ongoing cultural fissures vividly to life. A deadly struggle against murderous kidnappers in Grand Canyon National Park forces archaeologist Chuck Bender to face up to his past as he realizes every parents’ worst nightmare: a missing child.

Spirit Walk by Jay Treiber

Brimming with bordertown corruption and blame-ridden recollections, this powerful literary debut opens at a turning point for college professor Kevin McNally, whose personal and professional lives have run aground, haunted by a violent border clash from his youth. Now, McNally must journey back to southeast Arizona’s chaparral country to face the loss and trauma of his past.

29 by Mary Sojourner

Nell Walker, an L.A. executive who believed she had everything and learns she had nothing, finds herself boarding a bus rolling away from bitter loss toward a fiercely beautiful landscape, an impossible love affair, and a fight for the earth that brings her back to a past richer than anything she could have imagined.

Monument Road by Charlie Quimby

Leonard Self has spent a year unwinding his ranch, paying debts and fending off the darkening. Just one thing left: taking his wife’s ashes to her favorite overlook, where he plans to step off the cliff with her. But Leonard’s route will intertwine with old wounds and new insights that make him question whether his life is over after all.

My So-Called Ruined Life by Melanie Bishop

After losing the previous summer to the shock and grief of her mother’s murder, Tate McCoy is putting her life back together, aiming to make the most of her seventeenth summer, filling it with friends, camping, and a poolside crush. New insight into the death of her mother, however, threatens to spiral her summer—and her life—out of control. First book in the Tate McCoy Series.

 The Ordinary Truth by Jana Richman

When Nell Jorgensen buried her husband after a hunting accident in 1975, she buried a piece of herself, her relationship with her daughter, and more than one secret. Now, thirty-six years later, her granddaughter, Cassie, intends to unearth those secrets and repair those relationships, but she’s unprepared for what she finds. An emotional landscape of love, loss, and family.

Tributary by Barbara K. Richardson

A misfit in a Mormon frontier town, protagonist Clair Martin shows what polygamy feels like from inside the fold. Her stubborn search for identity takes Clair beyond the confines of the Utah Territory to the slums of Reconstruction Dixie, and back again. Here, one young woman’s life becomes a quiet revolution to untangle what you inherit from what you need.

Recapture & Other Stories by Erica Olsen

Recapture is a collection of short fiction set in an American West that is both strange and familiar. Erica Olsen writes about archaeologists, museum curators, hikers, and pothunters; men and women engaged in preservation and destruction, figuring out how to live, work, remember, and love in an unstable world.

Grind by Mark Maynard

This debut collection of linked short stories examines the characters of a town whose means and meanings are eroding away and are searching for the next best thing. Each of their lives are inter-connected in surprising ways and the book examines the idea of “occupations” and how much of what we do defines who we are.

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Crooked Creek by Maximilian Werner

Crooked Creek takes place during the latter part of westward expansion and chronicles the lives (and deaths) of the Wood family. The Woods must flee Arizona when they unwittingly get caught up in the plunder and sale of American Indian corpses and funerary objects. But from the moment they ride into Heber Valley, Utah they learn that life in the valley is not as it appears, and that no matter how far we run, we cannot escape the past.

The Scholar of Moab by Steven L. Peck

What happens when a two-headed cowboy, a high school dropout, and a poet abducted by aliens come together in 1970’s Moab, Utah? The Scholar of Moab, a dark-comedy perambulating murder, affairs, and cowboy mysteries in the shadow of the hoary La Sal Mountains.

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The Plume Hunter by Renée Thompson

A story of conflict, friendship, and love, this novel follows the life Fin McFaddin, a late-nineteenth century Oregon outdoorsman who takes to plume hunting – killing birds to collect feathers for women’s hats – to support his widowed mother. In 1885, more than five million birds were killed in the United States for the millinery industry, prompting the formation of the Audubon Society. The story brings to life an era of our country’s natural history seldom explored in fiction.