The Canyon of Bones by Richard S. Wheeler $24.95
Richard Wheeler’s latest in his Barnaby Skye series opens as Mister Skye, the name he insists on being called, ruminates about the passing years. Once a young British seaman who had jumped ship and headed west, he is now feeling the effects of age.
He worries about his beloved Crow wife, Victoria, who has been nagging him lately to take another wife to help with the work. But his more immediate concern is the annual trek when he is expected to guard the Crows as they head south to camp with the Shoshones to trade and gossip.
The trip goes smoothly, and as the tents are erected, Skye notices a white man’s tent, some draft horses and several white men. Yet he sees no array of the usual gaudy goods of traders. Then a man who appears to be the leader introduces himself as Graves Duplessis Mercer. Skye decides that, with a three-piece name like that, the man must be rich.
Mercer explains that he writes for the British tabloids and considers himself a master storyteller. He is also an explorer, cartographer, artist and linguist fluent in several languages. Yet for the journey he has in mind, he will need Skye’s ability with sign language.
Specifically, he intends to visit the Mormons, the geysers that bubble on plateaus with the gigantic bones of ancient monsters embedded in canyon walls. All of this he will use as material for a paper he plans to write for the Royal Society of London. And he offers to pay Skye well to act as a guide.
Skye is tempted. Though Mercer’s outfit is well-equipped, something about the man bothers him. But when Skye takes Blue Dawn, the granddaughter of Sacajawea, as his second wife, he and Victoria decide he should take the job.
Skye soon learns Mercer has no concept of the country’s size, but he finally agrees to show him the geysers and then take him to the Missouri River Valley and the gigantic bones. Yet the more Mercer talks of taking some of the bones as trophies, the more Victoria worries about the consequences of disturbing the bones that are sacred to her people.
Soon they enter dangerous territory where Crows and Blackfeet compete for dominance. But when a line of mounted Indians appears, all of them painted in a ghastly fashion, the story takes a sharp turn in a new and intriguing direction.
With his signature attention to authentic details, “The Canyon of Bones” is Wheeler at his storytelling best.
Lone Creek, by Neil McMahon, $24.95 | In his latest novel, Neil McMahon introduces Hugh Davoren, a Stanford graduate, ex-boxer and former journalist who has returned to his home town of Helena, Mont., to put his life back together.
Hugh finds construction work on the sprawling Pettyjohn ranch. Though now owned by Wesley and Laurie Balcomb, wealthy transplants raising thoroughbred horses, the place still holds memories of when Hugh’s teenage love died there.
One afternoon as he takes the day’s last bag of trash to the ranch’s huge dump, Hugh smells something strange that might be a dead horse, and he starts digging. What he finds are two dead horses, each with a chunk of flesh the size of his fist gouged out of its neck. The barbarity of the act stuns him.
Then Hugh is stopped from leaving the ranch, first by the foreman and then by Kirk Pettyjohn, the only remaining son of the ranch’s original owner, who is said to be heavily using meth. But not until Hugh is arrested the next day on a trumped- up charge is he sure that he has stumbled onto something dangerous.
Hugh goes to his old friend Madbird, who grew up on the Blackfeet reservation and was a Marine in Vietnam, for help. When Hugh shows him the horses, Madbird warns Hugh that he has entered another world where nothing will be the same. And with Madbird as Hugh’s only support and Laurie Balcomb, who claims to be fleeing her brutal husband, in tow, the body count begins.
Although Hugh’s relationship with Laurie fails the credibility test, the author uses his obvious understanding of Montana’s past and present to build a fast-moving story of intrigue that keeps the reader hooked to the very end.
Sybil Downing is a Boulder novelist who writes a monthly column on new regional fiction.
