Featured in Keith McCafferty's four previous Montana crime novels (including 2016 Spur Award-winning Crazy Mountain Kiss), Sean Stranahan is still living the western fantasy life: watercolor artist, fishing guide, private detective and regular at the Trout Tails Bar and Grill, which features a topless mermaid swim tank. When part-time mermaid Ida Evening Star hires him to find her childhood friend John Running Boy, the case entangles Stranahan with his ex-lover Sheriff Martha Ettinger, who is investigating the bloody scene of an apparent re-enactment of the ancient Plains Indian practice of pishkun--herding bison over a cliff to harvest their meat, skins and bones to sustain the tribe over a long winter. At the bottom of the Palisades scree, she finds the body of a young Blackfeet man, disemboweled, with a handmade arrow in his thigh. The murder victim was last seen with John Running Boy and two wealthy white brothers from Dartmouth. Together, Stranahan and Ettinger follow the clues through southwestern Montana's complicated politics, involving state DOL agents, National Park Service rangers, anti-bison ranchers, save-the-bison evangelists, bureaucrats and disenfranchised Native Americans.
An editor of Field & Stream, McCafferty knows the locals, the landscape and the legends, as well as his Montana literary antecedents ("Tom McGuane, James Welch, A.B. Guthrie, William Kittredge, Ivan Doig, Richard Hugo... more drinking and depression on this shelf than in the whole of Ireland"). But mostly he knows how to tell a good story, and Buffalo Jump Blues is a solid addition to the Stranahan saga. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.