A month ago, I reviewed a frontier mystery set during the 1920s in Rocky Mountain National Park. C.M. Wendelboe’s The Marshal and the Mystical Mountain is a compelling, violent story for all of us who love the works of Craig Johnson and Margaret Cole. Wendelboe brings thirty-eight years of law enforcement experience in South Dakota and Wyoming to this riveting book. Now, the same publisher brings us a frontier mystery set during the Great Depression in Wyoming.
Yancy Stands Close lost his job with the Wind River Tribal Police due to budget cuts during the Depression. But, he’s worked with Wyoming’s U.S. Marshal Nelson Lane before, and he takes him the case of a missing person. According to Yancy’s latest lover, Sally Maddis, she hasn’t heard from her brother, Jesse, in several days. The muckraking journalist was working on speculation, investigating the Mystical Mountain Lodge. According to rumor, wealthy investors bought it a year earlier. It costs visitors $1000 to “trespass” on the 8000 acre property, to hunt elk and other wildlife. But, Sally says the visitors also party hard because she’s been paid large sums of money to party with them. Everyone from senators and movie stars to Al Capone have visited the resort.
Marshal Lane is not one of the welcome visitors to the resort. In fact, he’s made to feel extremely unwelcome, and the security team is not happy with his appearance at the lodge. In fact, he’s so unwelcome, that the former WWI Marine is hunted and shot at, and even rescued once by a poacher, an old enemy. As Lane investigates, though, he discovers a body and signs that several women may have been killed during a visitors’ weekend. He’s not going to let it go. Eventually, he sends a deputy undercover, and is forced to bring together a group of unlikely allies to take down a group of killers.
From the time I was a child, I liked those Saturday morning westerns, and watched Bonanza with my father. A frontier mystery is right up my alley, combining a violent western, a flawed hero, and a mystery. Although The Marshal and the Mystical Mountain is the third in a series, I wouldn’t hesitate to give it to anyone who likes westerns or the current mysteries set in Wyoming.
C.M. Wendelboe’s website is http://www.spiritroadmysteries.com
The Marshal and the Mystical Mountain by C.M. Wendelboe. Five Star, 2020. ISBN 9781432868369 (hardcover), 234p.
*****
FTC Full Disclosure – I received the book to review for a journal.
I put this one on my library list also. Now to wait for the library to put it online.
Libraries are going to have eager customers when we reopen. I hope you enjoy it, Gram.
Hi Lesa
I've never read a Western, so maybe it's about time i did – this does sound interesting. I'll see if our libraries have any as ebooks.
I hope you're right about the popularity of libraries once they can open their doors again, many of ours are constantly under threat because their borrowing numbers are so low. People here have this romantic notion of every village having its pub, its shop and its library, but they rarely use the latter two – the shop is more expensive than the supermarket 5 miles away, and the library is something they don't really make time for, especially once their children grow up. Scotland is much better than England at continuing to fund its libraries though – my mother's old library in suburban London, which was expensively refurbished not that long ago, is now run only by volunteers and closed most of the time. She is hugely impressed with the library in Haddington (the small town outside Edinburgh, where she now lives in sheltered housing) – the staff are wonderful and have helped her with so many things, and would also bring books round to her (normally that is), though as it is just 5 minutes away she still prefers to visit.
My grandma loved all those Saturday shows – we used to watch either Bonanza,The Virginian or The Big Valley every time she visited. I was just discussing this with my daughter the other day – how our perspective then was so different – not only did we never question the way that the white man was always portrayed as the one in the right, we also didn't ever analyse what was going on, and why those stories were so popular as a means of telling contemporary Americans that they were *still* the Great White Hope and could/should rule the world. Fascinating to look back on it all now.
You mentioned current mysteries set in Wyoming; do you mean ones set in present day Wyoming, and if so could you give us a couple of titles? I am always interested in reading a book set in a place about which I know little, and in the UK we do have a tendency to infer that all Americans live in NYC, Washington or California (or possibly Hawaii 5-0!)
Best wishes, Rosemary
Rosemary, Someday we should just compile all your comments on my blog & call them Snapshots of Scotland. They are always so thoughtful and interesting. Thank you for your thoughts about the TV westerns. I never thought about them like that.
Yes, current mysteries set in Wyoming. Craig Johnson's are my favorite, and he has a long-running series about a sheriff in a fictional county there. Craig himself is a rancher in Wyoming. He lives in Ucross, WY, population 25. The first in the series is called Cold Dish. But, I like his story collections and novellas even more than his novels, although they all feature the same characters. My favorite is Spirit of Steamboat, which was picked as One Book Wyoming, meaning libraries throughout the state read and discussed it. It's a novella.
Another series set in Wyoming is C.J. Box' Joe Pickett series. Pickett is a game warden. Open Season is the first in that series.
If you're looking for books set in any state, let me know. I'd love to make some suggestions!
I'm hoping people go back to libraries. What I fear is that we've spent so much time and money introducing them to reading online that they'll be happy with that. Guilty as anyone because I select some of the online collections for our libraries.
Take care, Rosemary. It's always a joy to read your comments.