CRAZY MOUNTAIN KISS is the winner of the Spur Award, a finalist for the High Plains Book Award, and a finalist for the Nero Award!
Crazy Mountain Kiss has just won the 2016 Spur Award for Best Western Contemporary Novel. The award is given out by Western Writers of America, a group founded in 1953 to honor and promote writing about the American West. The Spur is considered one of the most prestigious awards in American letters. Previous winners include Larry McMurtry and Tony Hillerman.
Additionally, Crazy Mountain Kiss is a finalist for the High Plains Book Award in Fiction, which promotes novels that examine life in the Rocky Mountain West, and is also a finalist for the Nero Award, which recognizes literary excellence in the mystery genre.
CRAZY MOUNTAIN KISS will soon be available in paperback
Spring snow still clings to the teeth of Montana’s Crazy Mountains when an unsuspecting member of the Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers Club discovers a Santa hat in the fireplace ashes of his rented cabin. Climbing to the roof to see what’s clogging the flue, he’s shocked to find the body of a teenage girl wedged into the chimney. A rodeo belt buckle identifies the recently deceased victim as Cinderella “Cindy” Huntington, a rising rodeo star. Hyalite County sheriff Martha Ettinger has been hunting for the girl since she went missing the previous November.
Was Cindy murdered? Or was she running for her life—and if so, from whom? Suspicion falls on a buckskin-clad mountain man who calls himself Bear Paw Bill. But Etta Huntington, Cindy’s high-strung mother, herself a famous horsewoman, thinks the evil might lie closer to home. She hires fly-fishing guide and private detective Sean Stranahan to find the answers. Setting aside their after-hours relationship, Sean and Martha find themselves deep in an investigation that grows to involve a high-altitude sex club, a lost diary, cave pictographs, and the legends of the Crazy Mountains. With his signature wit and wry humor, McCafferty writes a pitch-perfect mystery that is as haunting as the Crazies.
Praise
“The death of a young Montana rodeo star propels McCafferty’s terrific fourth mystery featuring artist, fly-fisherman, and occasional PI Sean Stranahan… a must for fans of eclectic mysteries in which the setting is just as important as the characters.”
—Publisher’s Weekly, Starred Review
“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.”
—Booklist, Starred Review
“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.”
—Kirkus
Keith McCafferty 