“Come Sundown,” by Mike Blakely (Forge, 480 pages, $27.95)
In “Come Sundown,” Spur-award winner Mike Blakely introduces Honore Greenwood, a man quick to remind the world of his many talents and blessed with the luck of the Irish. A fugitive from France, he plays the violin, wins at the gambling table and once apprenticed to Kit Carson and Charles Bent. When he worked as a skinner on the buffalo ranges, he was called Frenchy. Living with the Comanches, he is called Plenty Man. Whatever his name, he is a man to be reckoned with.
Told in narrative style and shifting back and forth in time, the story begins when Plenty Man is living with the Comanches and his wife, the chief’s sister. Because he speaks 13 languages, he has been given the job of trading captives for whiskey. So, with a captive Mexican boy in tow, Plenty Man heads toward Kit Carson’s ranch on a branch of the Santa Fe Trail.
There Bent tells him of his plans to take a herd of sheep to California and asks him to come along. Greenwood has no interest in a venture as predictable as herding sheep and he returns to the Comanches, who always manage to test his intellect.
But, in 1861, when Civil War is declared and Kit Carson is made a lieutenant colonel in the First New Mexico Volunteer Infantry, Greenwood agrees to join up and serve under Carson as a scout and a courier for the Union as he did during the Mexican War.
The fighting is fierce, but finally, the Confederates are defeated at Glorietta Pass, and they head back to Texas. But now Indian troubles are on the rise.
When Carson receives orders to kill all Indian men of the Mescalero tribe, Greenwood leaves, certain the Arapaho will be next, followed by the Cheyenne and the Ute, even the Comanche. But he discovers life has become hard for his adopted people, and he goes back to Carson with a proposal in a last desperate effort to help them.
Though historical details and the introduction of lesser characters sometimes waylay the major thrust of the story, “Come Sundown” remains an intriguing examination of a man with seemingly infinite abilities yet helpless to hold back the change enveloping the world he has come to love.
“The Tobermory Manuscript,” by Jame C. Work (Johnson Books, 304 pages, $15)
On a fine spring day in 1874, Rocky Mountain Jim Nugent was riding across Estes Park where Lord Dunraven was busy building a small empire, when he was suddenly shot and killed by Griff Evans. Or so historical accounts maintain. But English professor David McIntyre, long fascinated by Estes Park’s early settlers, is not sure he believes them. Nor does he go along with his academic cohorts and friends who maintain the killing was accidental.
McIntyre reasons the truth behind the killing could lie in a manuscript Nugent is said to have sent to Isabella Bird, author of “A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains,” after she returned to Scotland. But when the chairman of his department turns down his request for a leave of absence to pursue his search, he throws caution to the wind, charges his plane ticket to his credit card and flies off to London.
There he meets Otis Corrigan, who claims to be an antiques and rare books dealer and seems to have unusual connections. In Edinburgh, McIntyre encounters Corrigan’s sidekick. A strange man at his hotel lurks in the background. But McIntyre only has two weeks left and he heads to the Isle of Mull and the town of Tobermory where Bird lived and where the manuscript might be held.
He takes a room with a local family who gives him some tips. He talks to the curator of Bird’s cottage. But that night he is beaten up by a couple of drunks outside a pub. And after a close call when walking along the cliffs, he is interrogated by the police. Now Irish politics are in the mix. But not until McIntyre returns to Colorado is he able to gather all the pieces together and come up with the truth.
Though the myriad of historical details used in the set-up tend to slow the pace and the occasional shift in viewpoint does not always work, this light-hearted mystery from the past with its engaging sleuth is tailor-made for Colorado history buffs.
Sybil Downing is a Boulder novelist who writes a monthly column on new regional fiction.
