Head wounds

This fourteenth installment concludes McGarrity's Kevin Kerney series, which began in 1996 with Tularosa. The focus of the novels has changed lately from Kerney, the now-retired Santa Fe chief of police, to his son, Clayton Istee, also a New Mexico cop. The transition from father to son is complete now, with Kerney taking only a cameo role and Istee investigating two brutal murders, with scalpings, that lead him into the heart of the borderland drug underworld. Like Kerney, Istee is torn between family and the thrill of the hunt, which finds him, along with a DEA investigator, tracking a Native American called El Jefe, who works as the top assassin for a Mexican cartel. Gradually, hunter and hunted come to have a grudging respect for one another, with Istee finding common ground between his Mescalero Apache heritage and El Jefe's Kickapoo lineage. McGarrity's series has always contained elements of noir, procedural investigation, and domestic drama, but here the color palette is more dark than light, as a confrontation looms between two men who would prefer to find a separate peace. A stirring conclusion to a fine series.

Bestseller McGarrity's exceptional 14th Kevin Kerney novel (after 2018's Residue) focuses on the retired police chief's son, Clayton Istee, a sheriff's detective in Doña Ana County, N.Mex. Clayton, who's dispatched to a hotel where someone scalped a man and woman after slitting their throats, recognizes the victims as Lucy Nautzile, a mother of two he'd known for all of her life, and her companion, James Goggin. Two years earlier, the pair went on the run after embezzling $200,000 from a casino on a Native American reservation. Clayton learns that the money was actually stolen from a casino patron, making revenge for the theft a probable motive. The plot thickens when an undercover DEA agent meets Clayton and reveals that the m.o. of the killings matches that of a Mexican freelance assassin known as El Jefe. Superior prose ("the spires of the Organ Mountains tinged gold from the sun low on the western horizon"), expert plotting, and believable characters make this a standout. Fans of gritty crime novels will be rewarded. (Nov.)

Retired Santa Fe police chief Kevin Kerney gets only a minor role in his 14th appearance. Considering what the leading characters are up to, that's a lucky break for him. It all begins at a motel where James Goggin and Lucy Nautzile have been scalped after their throats were surgically cut, presumably by Estavio Trevino, a professional assassin who prefers to be called El Jefe. As if the carnage isn't disturbing enough, John Cosgrove, the night clerk who reports discovering the bodies to Kerney's son, Deputy Clayton Istee, of the Doña Ana County Sheriff's Office, vanishes and promptly turns up with his own throat cut. It's the beginning of a pattern that plays out all over the tribal lands of New Mexico and environs: First characters are introduced by name, placed in a thickly imagined web of relatives, and given a backstory, then they're violently dispatched. Ever since stealing $200,000 from a tribal casino, the first two victims had been on the run--not from the law, to whom the theft was never reported, but from a mélange of gangsters, hirelings, informants, and paid killers who now all come rushing into Clayton's ken. Soon after agreeing to join undercover DEA agent Bernard Harjo in a journey to El Jefe, an encounter the all-knowing killer plans to end by ransoming his visitors, Clayton shoots El Jefe's adopted son, Fernando Olguin, in self-defense, putting himself squarely in the assassin's crosshairs, where he's got plenty of company. Gang leaders fight rival gang leaders, dirty cops go up against even dirtier cops, and it all ends with the 70th birthday party of Kevin Kerney. Remember him? Underneath all the chaotic plotting and crossplotting, McGarrity's New Mexico seethes with life. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.