Bad Country

C. B. McKenzie's debut mystery is set in a remote corner of Arizona that locals call the Hole, close to the border, where Rodeo Grace Garnet, a former rodeo cowboy, lives alone with his old dog. A body found near his home draws the police; the dead person is a member of a local tribe, not one of the migrants who cross nearby. Rodeo, retired from the rodeo circuit, scrapes by on piecework as a private investigator and bounty hunter, so when an elderly Native American woman hires him to find who murdered her grandson, he takes the case, even though she seems strangely uninterested in the result. The novel won the Tony Hillerman Prize.

Stephen King called it a terrific crime and suspense novel, and said the real discovery was McKenzie's fresh, original voice.