Dreams Beneath Your Feet, by Win Blevins, $25.95. Sixth in Blevin’s Rendezvous series, “Dreams Beneath Your Feet” begins as fur trader Sam Morgan, his daughter and his friend Hannibal head for California to settle down. The year is 1840; times have changed significantly since Sam first crossed the Southern Pass 16 years earlier. Yet horses are still valuable enough to make him decide to take a herd to the American settlements on the Willamette River and sell them before he heads south.
Sam knows there will be risks. The mix of the Crows on the warpath and the white man’s volatile politics could make the journey particularly dangerous. So when the party stops at Fort Hall on the Oregon Trail and a Hawaiian woman begs to come along, he hesitates. Only after he learns she is fleeing Kanaka Boy, her lover and a renegade former laborer for the Hudson’s Bay Co. who intends to sell her into slavery in Mexico, does Sam reluctantly agree. But when he discovers Kanaka Boy is following them, Sam knows the journey will prove even more perilous than he had imagined.
Once again, Blevins uses his extensive knowledge of the Plains Indians and the West’s fur-trade era to create an intriguing tale rich with details of the times and plenty of dangerous, if not always surprising, curves on the road to a satisfactory ending.
Three Weeks To Say Goodbye, by C.J. Box, $24.95. Author of nine thrillers, C.J. Box now brings readers a tale of children being used as pawns in drug deals. A travel specialist for the Denver Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau is the unlikely protagonist.
Jack McGuane and his wife have long yearned for a child. Finally, they are able to adopt a baby, Angelina, but one day they learn that the child’s father wants her back.
Not only did the 18-year-old father never sign away his parental rights, the teen’s father is a powerful Denver judge. In a desperate effort to keep the child, Jack and his wife arrange a meeting. After that, they are convinced something sinister is going on. More determined than ever to retrieve the baby, McGuane contacts friends in the police department.
From them, he learns the Mexican mafia may be involved. Jack broadens his search. But the information he manages to pick up is only third-party gossip and not admissible in court. Driven to get solid proof, he sets out on a hunt for facts.
The trail twists and turns. Links to espionage as far away as West Germany surface, only to hit more dead ends. Finally, McGuane pieces together enough information to understand why the judge and his son are so eager to have the little girl returned.
With his knowledge of the Denver area, the author takes readers from unsavory neighborhoods to the pinnacles of unscrupulous politics, concocting a complex yet generally satisfying thriller, pitting love against greed.
Sybil Downing is a Boulder novelist who writes regularly on new regional fiction.
