"That Hollister Man" by Margaret Desmond

Sage Dolan is a young 20-something, leaving Boston and headed for Montana. Her 17-year-old brother Danny is reluctantly with her; it’s because of Danny that they’re headed west. A brush with the law after getting involved with the wrong people has convinced Sage she needs to get him away. They’ve used the money left by their late grandfather to buy a home with a barn and acreage in the Sweet Grass Valley of Montana, realizing a dream Sage has always had of living out west.

She’s bought the house along with a restaurant from one of her online pie-recipe-sharing friends, Gigi Rinard, who’s now on her way to Arizona for the birth of her first great-grandchild. She leaves a casserole and some instructions, which include a kind of warning to “pay no mind to that Hollister man.” That Hollister man is Spence Hollister, who operates the ranch that mostly surrounds Sage and Danny’s new home. Gigi has informally promised Spence she’d sell him the property when the time came, and the Dolans turn out to be a huge and rather unwelcome surprise.

Margaret Desmond

Spence is the almost-stereotypical image of the modern cowboy. When she first sees him (riding a horse, no less), she’s knocked for a wallop, never having experienced that kind of reaction before. Spence is polite and friendly, but he wants the property. As it turns out, Spence is a widower in his mid-30s with a 15-year-old daughter, and he’s determined he will never fall in love and remarry after the pain of losing his first wife. But people begin to notice that something is changing Spence Hollister, and the only difference is Sage Dolan.

The reader knows where the story of That Hollister Man by Margaret Desmond has to go. The fun is watching it go there.

Desmond is the author of numerous romance stories set in Montana, including Her Ordinary Joe, Trusting Travis, Annie and Jake, Ethan’s Bride, Return of Devin Wakefield, and The Wrangler’s Wish. That Hollister Man is the first in her Sweet Grass, Montana series. A native of northern California, Desmond lives in Montana.

That Hollister Man is an engaging story of two people who fall in love but areboth  afraid of what falling in love means. 

“Along Came Jones” by Linda Windsor

A red horse, or sorrel, running wild in Montana ranch land drives Deanna Manetti off the road, with her foreign sports car pretty well banged up and undriveable. She finds herself being ministered to by what looks at first to be a mountain man – scruffy and smelly. The mountain man is actually an ex-U.S. marshal, Shephard Jones, living on what he hopes will become a horse ranch. The ranch is adjacent to the old ghost town of Hopewell.

Deanna happens to be on the run – from police, from her former boyfriend who framed her to take the fall for a money-laundering operation, and even agents the Drug Enforcement Administration. What she doesn’t know is that a Canadian drug lord is also after her, believing she knows where the $3 million her former boyfriend (and boss) stole from him. It doesn’t help her security that one of the DEA agents is working for the drug lord. 

A New York City girl transplanted to Great Falls, Montana, Manetti is convinced to come to Shephard’s ranch, at least until her car is fixed (it was his loose horse that caused her to crash). Once he cleans up, the mountain man turns out to quite a looker. Electricity flows; sparks fly. 

Along Came Jones by Linda Windsor tells the story of Deanna and Shephard. It’s equal parts romance, comedy, and suspense, with a healthy dose of horse ranching thrown in. It’s the story of two people almost instantly attracted to each other but both of whom having reasons not to trust the other. And it’s the story of how people can live out a life based on faith.

Linda Windsor

Windsor has published more than 30 novels in the romance, historical romance, and Christian romance genres. She’s won a number of awards, including from the Romance Writers of America, National Reader’s Choice Awards, Aspen Golds, Barclay Golds, and a Christian Booksellers Association Christy Award. She lives in Maryland.

Along Came Jones is an entertaining story of a city girl and a cowboy discovering each other and learning that they’re an intellectual and even emotional match – after a great deal of funny banter and a host of villains looking to do them in.

Top photograph: A ghost town in Montana, similar to “Hopewell,” featured in the book. Image by Marc Averette via Wikimedia Commons. Used with permission.

“The Gray Ghost Murders” by Keith McCafferty

Courtesy of a bear and her two cubs, a man’s body is found up one of the many trails on Sphinx Mountain in Montana. The body had been buried. Not far away, a second body is found, also buried. Both had been shot. The autopsies show that body men had been suffering from terminal diseases.

Sean Stranahan, a transplanted New Englander making sort of a living as a guide for fly fisherman, and doing some occasional detective work, is with local police when the bodies are found. And then he’s hired by a local fly fisherman’s club to find out what happened to two of the club’s prize antique flies, worth a fair amount of money to collectors. As he talks to other people who live nearby, he begins to stumble into information that’s important for the murder investigations.

The Gray Ghost Murders is author Keith McCafferty’s second installment in the Sean Stranahan mystery series (there are currently a total of five; this one was published in 2013). Each are set in Montana; and each reflect a fair amount of McCafferty’s extensive experience as the survival and outdoor skills editor of Field & Stream Magazine. And he lives in Montana.

Keith McCafferty

It’s also a well-told mystery story, likely to appeal especially to people who enjoy fly fishing and the mountainous outdoors.

Stranahan develops a romantic interest with a local barista at a coffee kiosk, and the sheriff has a personal interest in Stranahan as well, when she’s not involved with one deputies. When he lived in Massachusetts, he worked as a detective for a law firm, so he knows how to nose out information and ask questions. And soon enough he’ll find himself a target.

The Gray Ghost Murders is well written and engrossing story, even for those of us who don’t fish. McCafferty tells a ripping good yarn.

Photograph by Fran Hogan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Craig Lancaster’s “The Summer Son”

I’ve had my Kindle for four years now, and I occasionally discover a downloaded book that’s at first puzzling. Did I download that? If I did, why?

That’s how I tripped over The Summer Son by Craig Lancaster, published in 2011. It was sitting in my “Books to be Read” file on my Kindle. I clicked it open and started reading, and within the first few pages knew why I had it.

This is a story about a father and son, and how they are separated by more than miles. It’s a story about the oil fields in the West, and drilling in places like the Uinta Basin in Utah. And it’s about family, and family secrets, secrets buried but still affecting the lives of people who had nothing to do with them.

I know why the book is on my Kindle. My own father worked in the oilfields.

Mitch Quillen sells medical equipment. He, his wife Cindy and twin children live in San Jose. The marriage is rocky and getting rockier. Mitch hears from his father Jim about once a year; then he hears from him three times in a week. Each call lasts less than a minute. Cindy, knowing that their marriage is tied into Mitch’s problems with his father, convinces him to fly to Billings, Montana, to see what’s happening and try to resolve the relationship.

The answer is buried in the past, and buried even further back than Mitch realizes. When Mitch was a child, he spent summers with his father. His parents were divorced; his father was an independent oilfield driller based in Billings but working all over the West. The story moves back and forth from the crucial summer of 1979, when something happened that broke the father-and-son relationship, to the current year of 2007.

Mitch will learn that the reasons for his broken relationship with his father stretch back to his father’s own childhood. And also explain his father’s two broken marriages.

Craig Lancaster

It’s a captivating story, one that asks deep questions, compelling the reader to think through his own relationship with his father, and how much he does, and doesn’t, know.

In the process, we learn a lot about the oil business and its boom-and-bust cycles, the hard and fast living of many of the people involved in it, a fair amount of oilfield profanity, and how a father and son have to face the question of whether they even want to understand each other.

Lancaster is the author of several novels and a short story collection, including Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure: Stories (2011); 600 Hours of Edward (2012); Edward Adrift (2013); The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter (2014); and This is What I Want (2015). He lives in Montana.

A Summer Son is a seriously good story. I’m glad I found it on my Kindle.

Photograph: Utah Department of National Resources, Oil & Gas Division.