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Summary
Summary
After a failed career and marriage in California, Hugh Davoren is back in Helena, Montana, as a construction hand at the old Pettyjohn Ranch, home of many childhood memories--including the seemingly accidental death of his teenaged first love, Celia.
Hugh is just trying to get through another long workday on the ranch when he discovers two dead stallions. A further probe into the matter only pushes Hugh into dangerous corners, as he finds that the ranch's slick new owner, his beautiful wife, and even old Mr. Pettyjohn have terrible secrets to keep.
Author Notes
Neil McMahon is the author of five novels, including the recently published Lone Creek. McMahon is also a carpenter in Missoula, where his wife coordinates the Montana Festival of the Book. Praised by fellow writers like Michael Connelly, James Crumley, Annick Smith, and William Kittredge, McMahon is working on the sequel to Lone Creek. He also held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
McMahon (Revolution No. 9 and three other thrillers starring Dr. Carroll Monks) delivers his finest achievement to date with this beautifully written stand-alone set in contemporary Montana. Hugh Davoren, a former journalist and ex-boxer now doing construction near where he grew up outside Helena, is working on the building of a massive residence on the old Pettyjohn homestead, recently purchased by an East Coast businessman, Wesley Balcomb. Davoren keeps his head low and does his job, until he comes across two thoroughbred horses unceremoniously shotgunned and buried in the site trash dump. Next thing he knows, Davoren's thrown in jail overnight on a trumped-up charge. What kind of shady operation is Balcomb running, and why is he suddenly so determined to ruin Davoren's life? Aided by his co-worker and friend, "Madbird," a hardcase Blackfoot Indian and Vietnam vet, Davoren grapples with a host of antagonists, including Kirk Pettyjohn, old man Pettyjohn's crack-addict son, and an assassin known as John Doe. A natural storyteller, McMahon is sure to appeal to fans of James Crumley and Jim Harrison. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
In his Carroll Monks series, McMahon wrote four strong medical thrillers ( Revolution No. 90 , 2005), but his latest book, a crime novel set on the back roads of Montana, feels like the one he was meant to write all along. When Hugh Davoren, a ruminative ex-boxer and a construction worker on the sprawling Pettyjohn Ranch, stumbles across two dead horses in the ranch dump, he finds himself caught in a firestorm of events. Arrested, jailed, bailed, framed, and attacked, he is suddenly outside and on the run, with only his friend Madbird--a sidekick as memorable as Walter Mosley's Mouse--to watch his back while he tries to figure out who thinks he knows something and what he's supposed to know. Lone Creek0 gallops through some rugged terrain. Davoren, "the kind of guy who'd always bought dear and sold cheap," has a complicated past at the ranch, one that's tangled up with a dying ranching dynasty and a dead girl whose memory won't stay buried. Add to that the collision of Old West and new--laconic ranch hands, deep-pocketed dudes, and meth-snorting, wannabe soldiers of fortune--and you have a thriller of deeply satisfying complexity. McMahon might be ready to take his place alongside such writers as James Crumley and C. J. Box. We'd better see Davoren again--if we don't, it will be a crime. --Keir Graff Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
HISTORICAL mysteries often convey a sense of yearning for people and places irretrievably lost in time. That feeling surfaced in Mark Mills's haunting first novel, "Amagansett," as a lyrical lament for a Long Island fishing community whose traditional way of life was doomed by the booming prosperity of postwar America. Although a keen sense of loss and longing also suffuses Mills's second novel, THE SAVAGE GARDEN (Putnam, $24.95), the youth of its protagonist and the thrill of his exploits as an amateur sleuth keep depression at bay in this romantic and gracefully executed literary puzzle. Adam Strickland is drifting toward a degree in art history at Cambridge University in 1958 when his mentor comes up with a fascinating thesis topic and the funds to pursue it. Adam is to spend two weeks as the guest of the aged Francesca Docci at her villa in the Tuscan hills, studying a Renaissance garden built by a Florentine banker in memory of his wife, who died in 1548 at the age of 25. With precise references to well-known Renaissance paintings and famous gardens like Bomarzo and the Boboli, Mills creates an enchanting vision of wooded glades and grottoes, temples and reflecting pools, amphitheaters and classical statues of "petrified gods, goddesses and nymphs playing out their troubled stories on this leafy stage." But Adam is struck by certain discordant elements in the iconography of the garden - including a rather provocative marble statue of the banker's wife - and it's only by consulting sources like Ovid and Dante that he's able to unlock the garden's sad and ultimately shocking secrets. Mark Mills Although the aesthetic clues unearthed by Adam's classical scholarship are the most elegant aspect of the novel's design, the allegory of the Renaissance garden isn't the only mystery to be solved. As he did in "Amagansett," Mills uses a suspicious death as a way of examining the scars of war that never heal in a tight-knit community. Here on the estate, it's the murder of the elder Docci son and heir, ostensibly shot in the last days of the war by German soldiers occupying the villa, but a source of deep curiosity to Adam because he hears conflicting accounts of it from everyone in the household. Struggling to keep his head in this seductively drawn company of educated and refined landowners, Adam applies his academic approach to the tantalizing mystery and, at no small cost to his own ego, eventually solves it. But in the process this naïve young man also learns more than any outsider needs to know about the desperate measures families will adopt to survive the wounds of war. Playing the hero in a crime novel is a tough job at the best of times, but that professional burden falls especially hard on lawmen in western mysteries who have taken up environmental causes. In FREE FIRE (Putnam, $24.95), Joe Pickett, the Wyoming game warden who normally gives chase to cattle rustlers, out-of-season hunters and bug-eyed wilderness survivalists in the rugged outdoor novels of C. J. Box, is entrusted with nothing less than the well-being of Yellowstone National Park. Not even the governor grasps the magnitude of the threat to its natural resources when he dispatches Joe to investigate the bizarre case of a man who got away with killing four people because the murders were committed on a patch of ground beyond the legal jurisdiction of three states and, given a loophole in the law, federal prosecutors as well. "When I think of crime committed out-of-doors, I think of Joe Pickett," the governor says. So do we. And Joe doesn't let us down, leading us on an exhilarating tour of the park that covers every natural wonder, from showy Old Faithful to secret thermal springs spewing microbes, found nowhere else on earth, that may have great scientific and commercial value. But Box reaches too far with a convoluted plot about the environmental threat of "bio-mining" for these rare microbes, a subject that taxes his expository skills and undercuts Joe's greater value as a guide to nature in the raw. Hugh Davoren, the narrator of Neil McMahon's noir western thriller, LONE CREEK (HarperCollins, $24.95), admits that "wanting the old ways to stay was backward, selfish and above all futile." But that doesn't stop this cowboy existentialist from playing judge, jury and executioner when he discovers two shotgunned and gutted horses buried in the dump at the Montana ranch where he works as a construction hand. Davoren's rationale for dispensing violent justice to those who are destroying the old West would be more persuasive if he were less self-absorbed - and not such a sucker for the wiles of dangerous women. Nonetheless, McMahon is a writer and a half, and whenever he peels away from his brooding hero to look at the landscape or listen to the thoughts of humbler men, his words carry for miles. Maverick cops who write their own rules out of frustration with the criminal justice system are hardly unknown in detective fiction, but it's rare to find one whose decline and fall is as tragic as that of Detective Inspector Harry Synnott, the Dublin police officer who loses his soul in Gene Kerrigan's gripping procedural, THE MIDNIGHT CHOIR (Europa, paper, $14.95). Synnott is well aware that his old-fashioned values are out of sync with those of the new, entrepreneurial Ireland. But while the Celtic Tiger may have joined the modern world, Synnott can see that "we're still committing the same old crimes," and it eats him up when a rape case is compromised by his hard-nosed ethical code. To Synnott's grief, his efforts to game the system on another case go seriously awry, endangering the life of a young informant. "You're not the first policeman to find himself tripping over an ambiguous moral line," a superior officer observes. While that's hardly any comfort for Harry Synnott, it's good news for readers who can appreciate the moral complexities of this flawed hero. In Mark Milk's second historical mystery, a young British scholar unearths the sad, shocking secrets of a Renaissance garden.
Kirkus Review
Death of a neigh-sayer. Two hoofs belonging to two of the Pettyjohn Ranch thoroughbreds are discovered at the dump by worker Hugh Davoren, who grew up fixing things around the place when it belonged to old Reuben and his son, and sassy Celia Thayer flirted with all the men around, including adolescent Hugh. Currently, the ranch, straddling the border between Montana and Canada, belongs to Wesley and Laurie Balcomb, dilettante ranchers and horse-raisers. Laurie, a dead ringer for the bygone Celia, suddenly seems interested in Hugh, but he's got enough trouble on his hands without romancing the owner's wife. Fighting with Reuben's drunken son Kirk, he kills him in self-defense and buries the body with the help of his Blackfoot pal Madbird. Then he's ordered off the ranch when Wesley accuses him, rightly, of taking lumber from the place. Still, the boards had been discarded, the firing seems capricious--at least to Hugh--and in trying to salvage his reputation and life, he keeps bumping into Celia's double and discovering that Wesley's interest in the spread and the thoroughbreds is a cover-up for a get-rich scheme centering on the ranch's proximity to Canada. A sprawling western saga, more Edna Ferber than Agatha Christie, from the author of the Monks medical mysteries (To the Bone, 2003, etc.). Readers with a taste for escalating violence, Native American ritual and intergenerational lust may stick around to the end. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
From the moment construction hand Hugh Davoren found the dead horses buried on the Pettyjohn Ranch, he was a man in trouble, on the run from owner Wesley Balcomb, who wants him out of the picture. But Hugh is tough, in the way that all good Western heroes are tough, and he has friends-an old flame to bail him out of jail and a Native American veteran of the Vietnam War-to help him cope with the hit man sent to get him. Multiple mysteries, including the death of a young girl 20 years earlier on the ranch, combine to create a gripping Western thriller that keeps readers turning the pages. McMahon broke into writing with medical thrillers (To the Bone, Blood Double) but has returned to his roots in Montana for his fifth novel. Recommended for most large fiction collections.-Ken St. Andre, Phoenix P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Lone Creek Chapter One I'd only ever seen Laurie Balcomb a few times, usually glimpses while I was working and she was passing by on her way to someplace else. I'd never met her or spoken with her. She and her husband were the new owners of the Pettyjohn Ranch, and they didn't socialize with the help. But when she came into sight on this afternoon, riding horseback across a hay field, there was no mistaking her even from a quarter mile away. Her hair was auburn shot through with gold, she was wearing a brindle chamois shirt, and the way the sunlight caught her, she looked like a living flame. I hadn't paid much attention to Laurie before this, other than to notice that she was a nice-looking woman. The sense I'd gotten from her was subdued, distant. Even her hair had seemed darker. But now, for just a second, something slipped in my head--the kind of jolt you got when you were walking down a staircase in the dark and thought there was one more step at the bottom. I shook it off and slowed my pickup truck to a stop. This was September, a warm afternoon at the end of a dry Montana summer, and I'd been raising a dust cloud the size of a tornado. I figured I'd let it settle so Laurie wouldn't have to ride through it. But instead of passing, she rode toward me and reined up. The horse was one of the thoroughbreds she'd brought out here from Virginia, a reddish chestnut gelding that looked like he'd been chosen to fit her color scheme. Like her, he was fine-boned, classy, high-strung. A couple hundred thousand bucks, easy. "Are you in a fix ?" she called. She had just enough accent to add a touch of charm. In a fix, I remembered, was Southern for having trouble . I pointed out the window toward the thinning dust storm. "Trying not to suffocate you," I said. "Oh. How thoughtful." She seemed surprised, and maybe amused, to hear that from a man in sweaty work clothes, hauling trash in a vehicle older than she was. She walked the restless horse closer, stroking his neck to soothe him. She handled him well, and she knew it. "So you men are--what's the term--'gutting' the old house?" she said. The truck's bed was loaded with bags of lath and plaster, crumbling cedar shakes, century-old plumbing, the skin and bones from the ranch's original Victorian mansion. Nobody had lived there for more than a generation, but the Balcombs had big plans for this place. The mansion was on its way to being restored and turned into a showpiece for the kinds of guests who would buy the kinds of horses that Laurie was riding. "That's the term," I said. "You're an unusal-looking group. Not what I would have expected." "You mean we're not like the guys on New Yankee Workshop ?" "Well, there do seem to be a lot of tattoos and missing teeth." "They're all good at what they do, Mrs. Balcomb." "I'm sure they are. And don't misunderstand me--I think they're charming." That opened my eyes. I'd heard my crew called a lot of things, but none of them involved words like charming . "I'll pass that on," I said. "They'll be knocked out." "So why are you here all alone on a Saturday?" I shrugged. "Only chance I get to be the boss." Her smile was a quick bright flash that shone on me like I was the one important thing in the world. "You look like you could be bossy," she said. Then she caught herself up as if she'd slipped. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be impolite." I was confused, and it must have shown. "That scar," she said. "It's like on a villain in an old-fashioned movie." My left hand rose of its own accord and my thumb touched the raised, discolored crescent that topped my cheekbone. It wasn't something I ever thought about any more. The touch broke loose a run of sweat from the hollow under my eye down my nose. It itched like hell, and while I knew that scratching was bad manners, I couldn't help myself. My hand came away smeared with plaster dust and red chalk. "Just a low-rent injury and a surgeon with a hangover," I said. She smiled again, but this time she seemed a little disappointed. "You could come up with a more interesting story," she said. "Think about it." She turned the gelding away and eased him into a trot with her boot heels. I gave her a hundred yards lead on my dust cloud, then drove on. "Interesting" wasn't in my job description. Lone Creek . Copyright © by Neil McMahon. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Lone Creek by Neil McMahon All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
