Great seriesChapter One “Hooooowhup!” Dale Torrance bellowed, and his horse understood whatever that language was and ducked hard to the left, cutting off a calf’s escape. Dale and another of the H-Bar-T hands, Pat Gabaldon, worked the herd counter-clockwise around the corral’s perimeter. Every n...
The rugged Cat Mesa country north of the village of Posadas is hosting the first annual Posadas 100, a cyclo-cross bicycle race that promises to attract more than 140 competitors. Despite enough injuries during the pre-race practice to promise a spectacular--and dangerous--race, Undersheriff Este...
Bill Gastner, Undersheriff of Posadas County, knows ancient Anna Hocking didn't fall down her fruit cellar stairs by accident. He's also sure that elderly Reuben Fuentes knows nothing about the bodies scattered on his dusty, southern New Mexico ranch. No spring chicken himself, Bill summons his f...
At 69, Sheriff Bill Gastner knows his Posadas, New Mexico, territory as well as he understands trusting his instincts. So when a man is crushed to death by a backhoe, Gastner feels there's more to this accident. Adding to his problems are charges of dirty politics--during an election year, no les...
Finished 05/24/2014. Bill Gastner picks up a drifter whose bicycle tire has gone flat along the highway & treats him to a meal. When the man retires for the night near the school football field, there is a lot of activity & a young girl's body is left under the bleachers. The nomad is picked u...
Savvy storytelling infused with a spicy Southwestern setting."Not only does Havill offer a melancholy reinterpretation of that grand western myth of the slow-talking, fast-thinking lawman, he also writes crisp, marvelously detailed police procedurals in which a mix of technical know-how and infor...
Posadas County, New Mexico, hugging the San Cristobal mountains separating it from Mexico, has very few mean streets. No city-slick cop shop either, but an earnest, elected Sheriff and his aging Undersheriff, William C. Gastner. Pushing sixty, and the girth of his Sam Browne uniform belt, widower...
Another Posadas County mystery with Estelle Reyes-Guzman as the undersheriff, but with the ever more popular Bill Gastner peering out of the wings to which he dispatched himself upon retirement. Estelle's new job continues to be far from easy, and now she is faced the death of a young woman on a ...
I’d kept a half-acre and given the rest to Dr. Francis and Estelle Guzman. It had been a good move. The Medical/Dental Clinic built there had prospered, and I took a quiet pleasure out of occasionally cruising the spacious parking lot and seeing all the license plates from Chihuahua and other poi...
If he was surprised that Wednesday by the early-morning telephone call from the Sheriff’s Department, and if he wondered about a version of events other than the one he had heard from his wife and daughter, he kept it to himself. “We’ll have her there,” he said brusquely. ...
Ranchers from up north used it once in a while as a shortcut to the feed store at the end of Arturo Mesa, but not often enough to discourage the sage, goat-heads, and kochia from flourishing in the center mound. By taking the two-track, I could circle around first by the Prescott ranch and then b...
For just a moment, she looked at the instrument as if she could make it vanish before it triggered the answering machine on the fifth ring. She set the bottles of chilled juice down on the counter and picked up the receiver. “Guzman.” “Estelle, Tony...
“I should have sent the Snyder child home yesterday. She was running a mild fever, and I wanted to be certain that her recovery would be uneventful.” “What’s done is done,” Hardy replied. “But the mother, now…” “She complains of enormous heada...
The big Beechcraft had been pushed into the main hanger out of the sun, to wait for someone with the proper state-sanctified credentials to arrive and work on it. Jim Bergin, the airport manager and a crack A & E mechanic himself—but with no contract to supply services to the state—was amused...
Maybe it was just my glasses that needed cleaning, but the water appeared amber, as if it had been used more than once. With practiced ease, Torrez slid the empty pot under the drip and motioned for us to join him in his office. “I want to show you something,” he said. That was an imp...
But most of it was at a significant slope, far steeper than it appeared in the aerial photograph, where the tricks of the camera flattened features and distorted distances. By the time I worked my way to the top, ever mindful of my precarious balance on the rocky footing, I was puffing like an ol...
Tom Pasquale said. He had secured the weapon from the Fusion’s center console and held it up, a large black revolver made to look like a Smith & Wesson. He deftly pulled open the piston lever that projected from the bottom of the grips. “No gas cylinder. It wasn’t going to do him much good th...
“I remember that holster, for one thing,” the rancher said. “I saw that, and right away…” He took a deep breath. “Johns wore that 24/7, I think. Always wore that damn gun, everywhere he went. Always.” He looked at Gastner. “You probably remember tha...
“Let’s give him a good shove and be done with it,” she said to Horace, and the handyman mumbled agreement. A stone’s throw beyond Lindeman’s Mercantile, Gambel Street turned right, the grade becoming precipitous. Jake Tate’s crew had installed a step every twenty or thirty...
A bloodstain the size of a dinner plate soaked his denim work shirt. The shirt was old and faded, with plenty of rips here and there, the kind barbed wire would tear when a man’s a little careless ducking through fences. I stepped closer. The seven small holes in the center of his back were...