Western Book Roundup

MPIBA Book Awards Announced & Montana Genre Novels Abound

By Jenny Shank, 9-02-09

The winners of this year’s Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Regional Book Awards were announced last week:

• Adult Fiction: Another Man’s Moccasins: A Walt Longmire Mystery by Craig Johnson (Penguin)

• Adult Nonfiction: American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon by Steven Rinella (Random House)

• The Arts: Colorado’s Wild Horses by Claude Steelman (Wildshots, Inc.)

• Regional Reference: Staking Her Claim: Women Homesteading the West by Marcia Meredith Hensley (High Plains Press)

• Children’s Chapter Book: Go Big or Go Home by Will Hobbs (HarperCollins)

• Children’s Picture Book: The Illuminated Desert by Terry Tempest Williams, illustrations by Chloe Hedden (Canyonlands Natural History Association)

I have only read one of the above books—Rinella’s American Buffalo, which I thoroughly enjoyed and felt certain would win some prizes because it was so entertaining and distinctive.  Plus, who doesn’t like buffaloes?

The selection that interests me the most is the Adult Fiction winner, Craig Johnson’s Another Man’s Moccasins.  I’m sorry to say I haven’t yet read anything by Johnson, and it’s interesting to note that this is the first time since the MPIBA started giving these awards in 1991 that this category has been won by a genre novel rather than a work of literary fiction.  Some of the best contemporary books with Western settings have won this award—including Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses, Larry Watson’s Montana 1948, Rick Bass’s The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness—so I’m sure that Johnson’s work must rise above regular mystery genre conventions.  Clearly I’ve been missing out.  If there are any Craig Johnson fans out there, leave a comment and let me know what captured your attention in his books. 

Johnson wrote a classy thank you on the MPIBA blog, which begins, “All right, there are a few awards I figured I’d never get, and I got both of them this year—one was the Western Writer’s of America Spur Award and the other is the Mountains & Plains Independent Bookseller’s Association (Regional Book Award - Fiction) Novel of the Year.”

Speaking of genre vs. literary novels, a while back I pondered why it seemed like there were more genre novels set in Colorado, and more literary novels set in Montana.  But lately a number of genre novels with Montana settings have come to my attention:

The current literary craze for all things zombie and vampire has a counterpart in Montana: the werewolf novels of Butte native Patricia Briggs.  Briggs keeps busy writing several series of fantasy novels; her Alpha and Omega series is all about werewolves.  The most recent is Hunting Ground (Ace, 304 pages, $7.99), which hit stores last week.  A reviewer known as “Janine” of the romance novel review blog Dear Author,…offered one of the first reviews, and she included a good summary of the werewolf duo at the center of the series, the Montana-based Charles, and his lady—er—dog love Anna:

“Charles is an over two hundred year old, half Native American werewolf. He is dominant enough to be an alpha, but his pack has one werewolf who is even more dominant — Bran, Charles’ father, an alpha of alphas, also known as the Marrok, or leader of all of North America’s werewolves…Anna, Charles’ mate, is an omega werewolf, which means that she is outside the pack structure. She cannot be commanded by anyone, but she also lacks the alphas’ aggressive tendencies. Instead, her presence has a calming influence on dominant wolves. Anna is a relatively young werewolf, only in her twenties. The pack Anna originally belonged to abused her and assaulted her sexually, and Anna’s recovery from those attacks is an ongoing process.”

Meanwhile, in the same state, but over in thriller land, Lisa Jackson sets her new series featuring two female cops in the Montana wilderness near the fictional town of Grizzly Falls.  Jackson recently described her series, including her new book, Chosen To Die (Zebra, 484 pages, $7.99), in an interview with the blog Cheryl’s Book Nook.  Jackson said her editor suggested writing a book with two female cops, and initially she rejected the idea:

“But, as is often the case, the idea grew on me and I saw not cops in the city, but two detectives in the raw Montana wilderness. Those detectives grew in my mind. the first was Regan Pescoli, a hard-as-nails single mother, who has trouble with her ex-husband, teenaged kids, and hot lover. Regan just can’t seem to be all places at once. Then there is her partner, Selena Alvarez, a transplant from Woodburn, Oregon who is wound tight as a bobbin in my mother’s old Singer sewing machine and has a lot of dark secrets of her own.”

And I’ve been getting a lot of emails about self-published books, which I don’t have time to cover for the most part, but heck, since it goes with the theme of this week’s Roundup, I’ll mention Eve Nielsen’s Operation Eden (BookSurge, 476 pages, $19.99).  Nielsen, who grew up in Libby, Mont., and currently lives in Washington state, says that some of the book takes place in the Cabinet Mountains.  She spoke with The Western News about her writing process, and sent me a description of the book in an email:

“The basic premise is that an extremely wealthy and powerful group initiate a series of secret genetic experiments using randomly selected civilians, bypassing normal scientific protocol. The unwitting civilians are inoculated with specific-trait genes designed to enhance physical and mental characteristics, including ESP and longevity.  The purpose of this attempt by members of the group would be to enhance their own abilities as well as to offer the genetic cocktail for profit, once the results are achieved.  But some of their subjects discover what is happening and take steps to protect themselves.”

So, in the world of books at least, lots of strange, paranormal, violent things are going on up there in Montana.  Which doesn’t surprise me in the least.  Don’t let the werewolves bite, friends.

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