Dead Man's Fancy

Starred review from October 21, 2013
The politics of wolves drives McCafferty’s beautifully written third mystery featuring Montana fly fisherman and sometime PI Sean Stranahan (after 2013’s The Gray Ghosts Murders). Are wolves marauders the ranchers can exterminate? Are they part of the natural landscape, entitled to their share of the countryside? Or perhaps they are mystical creatures worthy of worship. Sean gets entangled in the wolf issue when Sheriff Martha Ettinger deputizes him to help look into the death of ranch hand Grady Cole, who somehow “got himself impaled on the antlers of an elk.” An attractive river guide and wolf activist known as the Fly Fishing Venus is also missing, and the hunt for her—dead or alive—gradually consumes law enforcement. The complex, multilayered story smoothly switches from one character to another. Even readers who think fish comes in a cone with french fries will feel like casting a line in a Montana river. Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary Agency.

November 1, 2013
A rescue attempt gone wrong teams up a Montana sheriff and a part-time private eye. Martha Ettinger, sheriff of Hyalite County, is searching for the employee of a local dude ranch when she discovers a member of her rescue party draped over an elk carcass and impaled on one of the antlers. The distraction of the man's death brings Ettinger no closer to finding the ranch hand, Nanika Martinelli, the Fly Fishing Venus, who's famous for her coppery hair and her affinity with wolves. Emerging from his tepee to help out with the case, Sean Stranahan--fishing guide, artist and detective--gets shot at when he investigates Nanika's abandoned home. Even after a long red hair found in wolf scat suggests that a wolf ate Nanika, her sister Nadina, also known as Asena after the legendary blue-furred wolf, hires Stranahan to keep investigating. A biker calling himself Amorak, a woman with orange eyes, a cult centered on a three-toed wolf and another murder lead the tough, laconic Ettinger and the enigmatic Eastern transplant Stranahan on a twisty path toward resolution. The leads' circumspect dance around each other is only one of the many satisfying elements in Stranahan's third case. McCafferty (The Gray Ghost Murders, 2013, etc.) knows his country and his characters, who have a comfortable, lived-in feel and yet shine as individuals. Although the plot takes its own time to unfold, it doesn't drag; McCafferty's understated prose deserves to be savored.

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November 15, 2013
When a beautiful, flame-haired fishing guide goes missing from a dude ranch, and one of the searchers is found impaled on the sword point of a dead elk's antlers, Sheriff Martha Ettinger turns to Sean Stranahan, the fishing, painting PI, for help. The missing woman, locally famous as the Fly Fishing Venus, has a complicated history that involves both an eerily charismatic biker and the save-the-wolf movementand, when her sister arrives from Canada and wants to hire Sean privately, things only get more complicated. The third Stranahan novel (following The Gray Ghost Murders, 2013) delivers a carefully plotted western procedural with interesting characters and relationships; a strong sense of its Madison Valley, Montana, setting; and plenty of fly fishing for readers who like to wet a line. Like C. J. Box's early Joe Pickett novels, it takes an evenhanded look at a controversial contemporary western issuein this case, wolf reintroduction. Good reading for fans of Box, Craig Johnson, Nevada Barr, and Paul Doiron, although McCafferty has his own distinctive voice.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)