Crazy Mountain Kiss

Starred review from April 13, 2015
The death of a young Montana rodeo star propels McCafferty’s terrific fourth mystery featuring artist, fly-fisherman, and occasional PI Sean Stranahan (after 2014’s Dead Man’s Fancy). When 16-year-old Cinderella “Cindy” Huntington is found dead in the chimney of a Forest Service cabin, it’s unclear if foul play is involved, but Cindy’s mother, Etta, hires Sean to do some digging. This means Sean will have to work with Sheriff Martha Ettinger, and things are tense between them since she recently called a halt to their romance. However, they undeniably make a good team, and what seems to be a straightforward death soon proves to be anything but. Sean and Martha find themselves embroiled in a family drama of epic proportions, as well as involved with a local “Mile High” club and an eccentric local mountain man. This is a must for fans of eclectic mysteries in which the setting is just as important as the characters. Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary Agency.

April 15, 2015
A missing teen requires the special talents of Sean Stranahan-fishing guide, watercolorist, former boxer, and occasional private eye (Dead Man's Fancy, 2014, etc.). Failed author Max Gallagher, who's renting a cabin in Montana's Crazy Mountains in the hope of writing a comeback novel, has trouble trying to get the chimney to draw. First a Santa Claus hat falls out, then he has to remove a crow's nest, and finally he finds an eyeless female corpse stuck inside. When Sheriff Martha Ettinger brings her team to investigate, she's not pleased to hear that Max is an acquaintance of her estranged lover Sean Stranahan. But, professional down to her booted feet, Martha's determined to focus only on the dead girl. The medical examiner doesn't see any signs of foul play, but he does note that the victim was five months pregnant-and five months is how long Cinderella, the beautiful teenage daughter of former rodeo star Loretta Huntington, has been missing. Loretta's husband is wrapped up in his work as a consultant for a TV Western, and the grieving mother, who's already lost two children, is barely holding herself together. When she can no longer deny that the girl in the chimney is her daughter, she hires Stranahan to find out what happened. At first he's uncertain whether Cinderella planned to use the cabin as the Mile and a Half High Club, the scene of prearranged and anonymous assignations, or whether she'd run away from trouble at home and used the cabin as refuge. The more Stranahan tries to make sense of clues as disparate as a local Bigfoot, an old powder horn, and a clown tattoo, the more intricate the puzzle grows, until he discovers an astonishing work of art that he hopes will bring peace to the tortured Loretta. Stranahan's fourth case blends humor with heartbreak, all flavors of eccentricity with a struggle for normalcy, and a natural backdrop that can make even the most powerful humans and their deeds look small.

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Starred review from May 1, 2015
When you find a Santa hat in the fireplace of your rented cabin deep in Montana's Crazy Mountains, you're obligated to look up the chimney, right? No, Virginia, you probably won't find Mr. Claus, but you just might see Cinderella. At least that what happens in the fine set piece that opens McCafferty's latest Stranahan and Ettinger novel. The Cinderella in question, the daughter of a wealthy rancher, isn't in the best of shape: she's dead, having trapped herself in the chimney, and her eyes have been plucked out by a crow. Sheriff Martha Ettinger knows this case could be troublethe rancher, Etta Huntingdon, has power aplenty and likes to use it. Ettinger wants to hire fishing guide and part-time detective Sean Stranahan to help with the investigation, but she recently ended a semi-secret relationship with Stranahan, and that spells awkward. The two attempt to act like adults, however, despite some entertaining sniping along the way, and, soon enough, Sean has identified the mountain cabin as a trysting spot for a twenty-first-century swingers' club and determined that Cinderella may have been living, either willingly or not, with a mountain man called Bear Paw. This sounds almost like a comic crime novel, and at times it is, but when it turns serious, it turns very serious, indeed. Like Brad Smith and Elmore Leonard, McCafferty does a marvelous job of manipulating mood, moving from light to dark in such a way as to intensify both. This is the best McCafferty novel yet, and it's a must for Craig Johnson and C. J. Box fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)