Willard Wyman | Blue Heaven
Willard Wyman spent four decades as a wrangler, guide and packer in the Bob Marshall Wilderness and California’s Sierra Nevada range. He traverses Montana’s backcountry again in his second novel, Blue Heaven.
Set in the Swan Valley of the early 1900s, Wyman tells the story of Fenton Pardee – a charismatic character from his first novel, High Country. The young stock handler has survived a gruesome train wreck that almost derailed Bill Cody’s Wild West show, and is making his way westward on horseback, trailing three pack mules and “liking the country more as he slanted up into it.”
He crosses the Continental Divide, and in Lost Bird Canyon, deep in what would become the Bob Marshall Wilderness, stumbles into the camp of Tommy Yellowstail. The young Salish Indian becomes his mentor and guide to this uninhabited land, and together they build a packing business that suits them both: “Tommy wanted to stay in his mountains; Fenton wanted to learn about them.”
It was something Pardee had… Read more
West of 98 | Living and Writing the New American West
This “modest” idea for this book – to invite a handful of writers to talk about what it means to be a Westerner – burgeoned, notes Lynn Stegner (who co-edited the compilation with Russell Rowland), into 67 writers, each writing about living west of the 98th meridian. I’m not apt to devour it. Instead, I plan to savor West of 98 piece by piece this winter. Read more
James Lee Burke | Feast Day of Fools
James Lee Burke returns to southwest Texas in his 30th novel – his third with Sheriff Hackberry Holland. His new book is as harsh as the Texas desert, and oozing with violence, as a strange and menacing array of characters tries to get their hands on a renegade Quaker, who has plans for making Predator drones stored in his head. Read more
Flora Wong | Long Way Home, Journeys of a Chinese Montanan
Flora Wong was born in Boston into a close-knit Chinese family of eight children. When she was seven years old, her father moved the family back to China with hopes of creating a secure and pastoral life near his birthplace. This was the first of many life-changing challenges that the Helena resident chronicles in her inspiring memoir, Long Way Home. Read more
Rick Craig | The Last Mountains
In his debut novel, Missoula writer Rick Craig deftly traverses some challenging terrain. Climbing ranger Tom Hadley is deeply mired in a murder mystery and political intrigue while trying to rebuild a relationship with his sensitive 11-year-old son. The only things going well in his life are a new romance with a long-distance runner, and his return to the rugged Grand Tetons in Wyoming. Read more
Warner B. Bair II | The Manse
Who’d have guessed that when author Warner Bair II moved back to his ancestral home of Deer Lodge after retiring from a long career as an attorney, prosecutor and judge in Arizona, his new digs would become the setting of a sequel to his “Anonymous Man” mystery series? His new novel, The Manse, delivers 190 pages of fast-paced action as the private investigator and his wife cope with an ever-widening web of intrigue and calumny. Read more
The Big Sky, By and By | True Tales, Real People and Strange Times in the Heart of Montana
Ed Kemmick, who writes the “City Lights” column for The Billings Gazette, has been enthralled with Montana since he moved to Missoula in 1974 from his native state of Minnesota. And he loves a good yarn – whether he’s crafting one or reading one. The best stories, he writes, “were told by people who had lived their adventures, not simply narrated them.” Read more