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Perhaps with very early spring, whinnies of faraway horses, the quiet of snow broken by a crow's calls, a smell of woodsmoke, and the whisper of a trout stream, it's hard for the writing not to occasionally reach for sublimity. Landscape, isolation both sought and not, snow both deadly and lovely, the force of sex which sets living creatures to seek, fight, or flee: these are on almost every page of CRAZY MOUNTAIN KISS.
Dramatis personae: Martha Ettinger, hardbitten Sheriff, Hyalite County, Montana; Sean Stranahan, quiet and thoughtful private investigator who lives in a tipi, sometime lover of the sheriff; Sam Meslik, fisherman with digs in Florida and Montana, member, as is Sean, of the Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers Club; Harold Little Feather, lawman, one of The People with a wry sense of humor; Cinderella Huntington, troubled teen, missing since November; Charles Watt, horsetrainer at the Bar-4 Ranch where Cinderella once lived, once a rodeo clown; Loretta Huntington, owner, Bar-4, expert horsewomen and saddlemaker, fragile, hurt by life, used; Earl Hightower, Ranch Manager, Bar-4; Landon Anker, young man who makes a few dollars mucking out the Bar-4's stalls and repairing fences, friend to Cinderella, gay, missing; Jasper Fey, Loretta's ex, also once a rodeo clown, he does not seem to care that his daughter is gone; Eileen Barnes, lesbian, potter; Maria, her significant other who hates men; Katie Sparrow, rescue dog handler whose beloved died in an avalanche; Bear-Paw Bill, giant, perhaps crazy, lives by himself on the mountain.
The action begins when a writer, seeking solitude in an isolated cabin in Montana, finds the dead body of a girl lodged in the cabin's chimney. As it becomes clear, the girl is Cinderella Huntington, who has been missing nearly six months.. Why this girl left home is the question left to private investigator and fly fisherman Sean Stranahan. There are clues, but they require much unraveling before the fibers can be followed to their source: the girl was with child when she died. Her foot has a nail puncture. Dirty and thin, she had been living out-of-doors for six months. Her clothing consists of what she ran away in, plus a primitive elk skin jacket for warmth. Missing at the same time was her friend from high school, Landon Anker, who has come out as a homosexual to his parents; Cinderella loved him. The cabin in which Cinderella has been found is used in the off-season for the meetings between members of the Mile High Sex Club who are matched for assignations by the club's secret founder. Partners know when their turn has come around by reading a code in the newspaper. A rule of their using the cabin is that they must take something and leave something in the cabin's geocache.
However, in this, as in the best murder mysteries, the murder is merely the means to investigate another point entirely, and, in this novel, that point is human loneliness, and the human desire to love another, to create a child in his or her own form. In CRAZY MOUNTAIN KISS, Cinderella and Anker's parents each lose a child, and there is simply no cure for the loss. Loretta has lost an arm in an automobile accident; in the state of "three-fingered men," farm machinery has claimed fingers and other body parts besides; love has claimed and deformed many hearts, and there is no cure, other than living with the deformity.
§ Dr. C. Downs is professor of English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville and a fan of the well-turned whodunit.
Reviewed by Cathy Downs, July 2015
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