Bad Country

by CB McKenzie Narrated by Mark Bramhall

Overview

Winner of the Tony Hillerman Prize, Bad Country is a debut mystery set in the Southwest starring a former rodeo cowboy turned private investigator, told in a transfixingly original style.

Rodeo Grace Garnet lives alone, save for his old dog, in a remote corner of Arizona known to locals as the Hole. He doesn't get many visitors, but a body found near his home has drawn police attention to his front door. The victim is not one of the many illegal immigrants who risk their lives to cross the border just south of the Hole, but is instead a member of one of the local Indian tribes.

Retired from the rodeo circuit and scraping by on piecework as a private investigator, Rodeo doesn't have much choice but to say yes when offered an unusual case. An elderly Indian woman has hired him to help find who murdered her grandson, but she seems strangely uninterested in the results. Her indifference seems heartless, but as Rodeo pursues his case, he learns that it's nothing compared to true hatred-and he's about to realize just how far hate can go.

Capturing the rough-and-tumble corners of the Southwest in accomplished, confident prose, with a hard-nosed plot that will keep readers riveted, Bad Country not only won the Hillerman Prize but also the Spur Award for Best Western Contemporary Novel and was a finalist for a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, the Shamus Award for Best First PI Novel, and the Edgar Award for Best First Novel.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Marilyn Stasio

McKenzie's voice is as dry and gritty as desert sand, just right for scouring this harsh landscape of cheap motels, run-down trailer parks and Indian trading posts selling polyester blankets.

Publishers Weekly

09/08/2014
Originality is the strong suit of Mackenzie’s Tony Hillerman Prize–winning debut. PI Rodeo Grace Garnet, a Pascua Yaqui who’s the sole resident of Vista Montana Estates in El Hoyo, Ariz., returns home from vacation to find a man shot dead by his front gates, “two jumbled piles of cinder block” on either side of a dirt road. Garnet first calls Sheriff “Apache” Ray Molina to report the crime, then notifies his lawyer, Jarred Willis, in Tucson, just in case law enforcement wants him for questioning. Later, a state trooper asks Garnet about three other recent murders in the area. Meanwhile, Katherine Rocha, a fellow Pascua Yaqui, asks him to look into the drive-by killing of her gang-member grandson, though she’s curiously indifferent to his fate. Wild cards include Garnet’s ex-girlfriend and Ray’s daughter, Sirena Rae Molina, and anthropology professor Tinley Burke, who dreams of being a writer. Drawing on this mélange of quirky personalities and Southwestern settings, McKenzie offers the reader an intriguing mystery and a new hero. (Nov.)

From the Publisher

Finalist for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel” —

“Praise for Bad Country” —

“"One of the strongest debuts to come along in years."” —Cleveland Plain Dealer

“"Bleak but elegantly told. … McKenzie's voice is as dry and gritty as desert sand, just right for scouring this harsh landscape of cheap motels, run-down trailer parks and Indian trading posts selling polyester blankets."” —The New York Times Book Review

“"An outstanding first novel written with clarity and authority and featuring a Southwest whose spare beauty covers unspeakable crimes and a detective who's tough, honorable and authentic to the core."” —Kirkus (starred review)

“This dirt-filled noir debut about a former rodeo cowboy turned private investigator has already earned comparisons to Cormac McCarthy, and the stark Southwestern setting might hold you over if you're still suffering from Breaking Bad withdrawal.” —Esquire

“"This edgy noir offers a master class on how to create a vivid sense of mood and place. Rodeo is a hard-nosed, hard-drinking man who searches for the truth as he understands it. Fans of the late, great Hillerman will cheer the arrival of a promising newcomer."” —Library Journal

“"Originality is the strong suit of McKenzie's Tony Hillerman Prize–winning debut. … McKenzie offers the reader an intriguing mystery and a new hero."” —Publishers Weekly

“"[A] hefty chunk of border noir that will give you the sense of grains of sand trapped within the binding. You absolutely do not want to miss Bad Country." ” —Bookreporter.com

“Hard-boiled? Boiled 'til the shell burst, boiled dry as adobe. … This is a very absorbing, fast, tough crime novel, set in Arizona Indian country and bound to be compared as much to the literary novelist Cormac McCarthy as to the late suspense master Tony Hillerman, who operated in these parts, and whose name is on a prize won by this very novel. … McKenzie is going to be demanding, and repaying, close attention for a long while.” —Sullivan County Democrat

“"CB McKenzie's Bad Country is a hard-boiled noir crime thriller set in Arizona Indian country. Tony Hillerman would have loved it. So did I."” —MICHAEL McGARRITY, author of Back Lands

“Bad Country by CB McKenzie is like that perfect arrowhead you stumble onto out on the trail, and then notice that it has bloodstains on it—a charged and unique southwest story that rings with an authenticity rarely seen in crime fiction.” —CRAIG JOHNSON, author of the Walt Longmire Mysteries, the basis for A&E's hit drama Longmire

“"Bad Country is a compelling debut, full of stark imagery and soaring prose. This novel's beautiful conclusion is going to stay with me for a long, long time." ” —MATTHEW GUINN author of The Resurrectionist

“"CB McKenzie's prose is much like his landscape, sparse and poignant, and the pages of Bad Country race by like a dust cloud across the plain. The pleasure of Bad Country comes in chasing that cloud to see where it's going to end up, and there's no way of knowing until you get there."” —MICHAEL FARRIS SMITH, author of Rivers and The Hands of Strangers

“"CB McKenzie's gripping debut Bad Country is a rare gem of a novel: a literary page-turner with a thrilling plot, compelling characters and a palpable sense of place. In spare prose reminiscent, but not derivative, of Cormac McCarthy's, McKenzie weaves a mystery that takes hold of the reader from the first page and doesn't let go until the last stunning line." —AMY GREENE, author of Long Man and Bloodroot"Bad Country immediately strikes the reader with the imagery of the state it depicts. Arizona becomes a character, an accomplice, and a secret keeper in the way that its stark desert environment spreads a layer of dust over everything from the writing style to the mystery itself.… There's nothing out there quite like Bad Country. As a mystery, as a setting, and as a view on culture, it's harsh. Transporting doesn't begin to cover just how this novel will take you somewhere. In the way it creates an environment of unbelievable harshness, it allows the mystery and the crime to flourish in a way that will satisfy mystery fans, especially those that want to feel enveloped in the world the novel creates."” —Criminal Element

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2014-09-28
A former Arizona rodeo star-turned-private eye takes on a plateful of cases that turn out to be different courses in the same criminal banquet. Rodeo Grace Garnet lives in the only habitable dwelling in the remnants of a planned community in an area called The Hole. Returning home with his old dog, he finds the body of a murdered Native American man. It's the start of a dizzyingly complicated and life-changing series of cases. Ray Molina, the sheriff of Los Jarros County, is a wealthy man with a thinly stretched department in a county whose vast empty areas provide an easy path for illegals and drug traffickers to enter the country. Ray's daughter, Sirena Rae, is a wild child Rodeo dumped after she shot his dog, though she still drops by to visit. Rodeo's friend Luis Azul Encarnacion, who owns the local trading post, sets him up to investigate the drive-by shooting of Samuel Rocha in Tucson. Samuel's grandmother wants to hire him to find the killer even though her whole family ignored Samuel in favor of his younger beauty-queen sister, who was killed in a hit-and-run. Probably the only person who did love Samuel is his lover, Ronald Rocha, a stone-cold killer and former special operations soldier whose erstwhile commanding officer is a wealthy man, a Tea Party candidate whose wife gets into the act by hiring Rodeo to find a missing manuscript after her brother dies of an overdose. Rocha threatens to kill Rodeo's dog and then Rodeo himself if he doesn't provide him with the name of Samuel's killer. As Rodeo slowly unravels a tangled mass of clues, he finds to his amazement that all these cases are interconnected. An outstanding first novel written with clarity and authority and featuring a Southwest whose spare beauty covers unspeakable crimes and a detective who's tough, honorable and authentic to the core.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169718522
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	11/04/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

As instructed, the man stopped at a certain landmark in the desert, stripped and used the cheap folding knife to cut his dusty khakis and T-shirt into small pieces. He tossed his old clothes bit by bit into a hard wind, unpacked the plastic trash bag and re-dressed in new clothes. He squatted in the skeletal shade of a creosote bush, sliced his last apple and chewed and swallowed each piece slowly then sipped bleach-treated water from a recycled milk jug through the heat of the day. Near sundown he cut the jug into small pieces and threw them and the knife into a steep-sided arroyo, took his bearings and then tore his map into small bits and broadcast these as he walked north. When he neared the meeting place he hustled through slanting shadows and hid behind the large boulder so that he could espy in both directions the sparse traffic on Agua Seco Road. As he waited his eyes strayed toward a solitary cloud towed north by invisible forces. A call and response from a pair of falcons hunting late he took as a good omen.

During the night a vehicle stopped in the middle of the turn-out. Muffled by closed doors and raised windows, the music from the SUV sounded like something the waiting man might hear when he stood outside a cathedral. When the vehicle shut down it was as if a trapdoor had opened on the surface of the world and all extant sound fallen through it. When a door unlatched, the dome light in the cab of the SUV illuminated a passenger in the backseat as a dark face under a white hat. The figure that emerged on the driver’s side had on a billed cap, dark glasses and a plastic coat that glimmered in the moonlight.

This is your ride, hombre. The command was a hoarse whisper aimed directly at the hiding place. Levántate. Into la luz.

The waiting man stepped into the glare of the headlights.

Tienes algo? the driver asked.

Nada, the man said. He spread his arms wide with his hands open. He had nothing but the new clothes on his back and the old boots on his feet, had no identification, no keys, weapons, cell phone or any paper with writing or numbers on it. He had no photographs of family, no money, no tattoos or identifiable scars, wore no jewelry and had never been arrested on either side of the border. He did not even know the name of his employer.

Eres Indio? the driver asked.

Si, soy Indio, the man said.

The man lowered his arms and waited for words that made more sense to him.

Has estado esperando mucho? the driver asked.

Si. Todo mi vida.

The bill of the driver’s gimme cap tilted down and then up.

I have been waiting my whole life for this too, the driver said.

The back door of the SUV opened and the man moved out of the headlights and toward his ride.

Adonde va? he asked.

Trabajar, hombre, said the driver. We go to work now.

Rodeo and his dog drove over “Elm Street,” which was but a collection of ruts and potholes, streambed cuts and corduroy stretches that led from the paved Agua Seco Ranch Road into a small dead end of southern Arizona called El Hoyo, The Hole.

Where the man and his dog lived was supposed to have been a full-service, upscale trailer park with concrete pads radiating like the segmented spokes of a big wagon wheel from the hub of an Activities Center, and wound through these spokes like a gourd vine a nine-hole golf course. But the investment venture had been mistimed and misplaced and so remained as only a concentric grid of blade-graded dirt roads marked at random intersections by unlikely green-and-white street signs now aimed into all compassed directions and bent by gravity to all angles of repose, mostly a collection of unpaid property taxes and dirt off the grid.

The old dog on the shotgun seat whined when he scented blood. Rodeo slowed as he approached the “gates” of his place, two jumbled piles of cinder block on either side of the dirt road with a sign advertising VISTA MONTANA ESTATES—AN ACTIVE LIFE COMMUNITY skewered on a splintered pole like a reminder note to do something later.

Cállate, Rodeo said.

The dog was quiet at his man’s command.

*   *   *

The corpse was facedown in the dirt, his jeans-clad legs widespread, boot toes pointed back, arms outstretched like a small, misguided Superman buried in a dead-end earthly mission. The back of his red, white and blue shirt was blown into shreds. Hung up on a piece of rebar, a pristine white straw cowboy hat twirled slowly in a breeze.

Rodeo sat for a long moment with a boot vibrating on the clutch pad, then he shifted the truck into neutral and stomped on the emergency brake. When the dog started barking Rodeo reached below the bench seat, pulled the 9mm from its stash site, jacked a load into the Glock and stepped out of the truck.

A cottontail hopped around a pile of vent bricks and froze and twitched and stared at the man with the gun. Rodeo waved his pistol but the rabbit moved toward the dead man where it sat trembling in the pool of congealed blood. Rodeo reached back through the open window and pounded the truck’s horn and the rabbit hopped away, his white paws tracing red across the desert. Vultures drifted overhead. Crows defined the margins of the crime scene by picking at spattered flesh and bone.

Rodeo reentered his vehicle, re-holstered his hideaway, calmed his dog, made a U-turn and headed back to the nearest place where cell phone reception was dependable.

*   *   *

Where you at, Garnet?

The voice of the Los Jarros County sheriff sounded in the cell phone like creek gravel sifted in a tin mining pan. Rodeo sat in the shade of the gas pumps island of Twin Arrows Trading Post, which establishment along with the handful of trailer houses scattered around it, passed as a village in a small county in Southern Arizona mostly uninhabited. He stared out the cracked windscreen of his truck at a sky that was bluewhite as an old blister.

I’m at the Store, Ray. Where you at?

I’m up to my ass in a crime scene right now over at the Boulder Turn-Out, so spare me the details if that’s possible.

Dead man by my front gates, said Rodeo.

Well, that’s a short story, said the sheriff. You know him?

I don’t know him, Ray. He’s a little man, probably Indio but probably not local. What have you got at the Boulder Turn-Out?

Some sort of death by misadventure, the sheriff said. And the body’s been here a while, so it’s tough for Doc Boxer to figure some theory out that will fit the evidence at hand.

What is the evidence, Ray?

Another dead Indian is the long and short of it.

What’s the official theory about these dead Indians in Los Jarros County, Ray?

We are understaffed and official theory–short about Major Crimes in Los Jarros County Sheriff’s Department recently, said the sheriff.

Rodeo said nothing.

You got some idea, Garnet? Official or otherwise?

State should send somebody down from Major Crimes Department to deal with my trouble out at the Estates, said Rodeo.

I doubt it’s just your trouble, Garnet, said the lawman. And I’m still the sheriff of Los Jarros County, so I’ll decide what needs to be done when I see what this new trouble is.

What do you want me to do, Ray?

You just sit tight at the Store, said the sheriff.

*   *   *

Hypothetical … Rodeo said. He was on the pay phone outside Twin Arrows Trading Post talking to his lawyer, Jarred Willis, who was in his well-appointed office in downtown Tucson.

I got my own shit to do, Chief, so put me out of my misery already.

You know where my place in El Hoyo is at, said Rodeo. You hid a Jaguar XJ with Texas plates in my storage shed last year, a vehicle that was later found in East Tucson with a dead cholo and his pit bull in the trunk.

That car was never registered in my name so don’t get on one of your Indian warpaths or this will be a very short conversation, Tonto. The lawyer paused. So what’s got up in your Hole out there most recently?

A dead man nearby the front gates of my place, said Rodeo. And The Hole’s not someplace you get to be dead in usually unless it’s by starvation or dehydration.

And these were not the case?

Death by shotgun would be my guess.

You didn’t touch him?

No point, said Rodeo.

When was he killed, do you think?

When I was away on vacation this last week sometime.

How many times I got to tell you to call the cops first, Tonto? It just looks real bad when you call your lawyer first thing because modern law enforcement can track these cellular phone shit conversations like Pocahontas could track short white dick in deep dark woods.

This is a pay phone. Ray’s on the way.

Well, if you’re smart as all that, Chief, then you don’t need a lawyer, do you?

I’ve often wondered about that myself, said Rodeo.

Rodeo’s lawyer laughed really loud.

Well, play it straight as you usually do then, Chief. And remember Law Enforcement don’t do Citizens favors, so don’t admit nothing to Police and don’t let them anywhere without a warrant and don’t invoke your lawyer’s name until you are firmly behind bars.

Good to know my lawyer’s got my back like that.

Save the sarcasm for the rodeo clown you rode in on, cowboy, said Willis. And you got about thirty seconds left on your retainer to tell me if you been in any shit lately.

I did that thing in New Mexico a couple of months ago and then found a lost kid and a lost husband and did a bit of divorce snooping in the last several weeks. Rodeo paused for a moment. Then right before I went on vacation I served papers on several minor characters for A-2-Z Bailbonds, but no criminals. So it’s been nothing major or personal for a while.

Then the dead man in your driveway’s probably nothing major or personal, Tonto. So just stay out of trouble on this and let Law Enforcement do their business.

Can I call you if Law Enforcement hauls me in?

You’re welcome to drop by my office in the Old Pueblo if you bring beers, said Willis. But you’re too low-rent for me these days, Chief. And since this phone call took care of what was left of your retainer fee I’ll just have to say hasta la vista to you as a client.

The lawyer hung up before the private investigator could.

Copyright © 2014 by CB McKenzie

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