Spur Awards

The year is 1916. The enemy, Pancho Villa, is elusive. The terrain is unforgiving, the intense heat and dust both relentless and overpowering. Through the mountains and across the long dry stretches of Mexico, Napoleon Childs, an aging cavalryman, leads an expedition of inexperienced horse soldiers on seemingly fruitless searches. Napoleon has weathered the storms of battle with a toughness that has become like a second skin, with the Rattler, a horse who's as flinty and seasoned as he. But this time, Napoleon can't control one of his young soldiers who has a penchant for reckless, dramatic actions--and who singlehandedly, in his desire to prove himself, makes a move that is the beginning of the end. Before long, Napoleon's patrol is at the mercy of an enemy who is intent not only on killing Napoleon's men but on something much bigger: avenging a brutal act.

Tracking a wounded mountain lion, Jamaica Wild is forced to take shelter from a snowstorm in an old Indian School. There she finds the frozen body of a murdered elderly Anglo woman.

Trapped in the snowbound Colorado mountains, Fremont must fight his way out. He battles the frigid elements in a harrowing journey over the backbone of the continent. In this tale of desperate danger and fierce courage, Wheeler presents the reader with a survival saga par excellence—a struggle of man against man, man against nature, man against himself—and a novel you will never forget.

A man, tied to a cross, his loincloth catching in the wind as he plummets down into the Rio Grande Gorge to his death. That is, if he wasn?t dead already. Rough-and-ready Bureau of Land Management agent Jamaica Wild, who witnesses the sinister event, sets out to determine whether a secret society with rituals as chilling as the desert night air might have been at the heart of this. Ever since she learned about Los Penitentes, a clandestine and ancient religious group that reenacts Jesus? crucifixion and practices excessive penance, Jamaica?s been fascinated, putting together a book of sketchings and research. And this death in the Gorge seems to fit with everything she has learned. But a haunted old priest warns Jamaica to put down her pencil. Her boss wouldn?t mind if she kept her nose out of things, either. But too many strange things are happening for Jamaica to pay any mind. For one, her medicine teacher, Momma Anna, has given her a cryptic assignment. And when someone makes an attempt on her life, Jamaica sets out on a fact-finding mission that could very well send her, like the crucified man, over the edge.

Retired from the Navajo Tribal Police, Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn is called upon once again to solve a crime. This time it's Joe's last case, a case that remains unsolved and contines to haunt him.

During Word War II, a family fnds life turned upside down when the government opens a Japanese internment camp in their small Colorado town. After a young girl is murdered, all eyes (and suspicions) turn to the newcomers, the interlopers, the strangers. This is her town as Rennie Stroud has never seen it before. She has just turned thirteen and, until this time, life has pretty much been what her father told her it should be: predictable and fair. But now the winds of change are coming and, with them, a shift in her perspective. And Rennie will discover secrets that can destroy even the most sacred things.

Called to investigate when a dead Vietnamese girl is found along a Wyoming highway, Longmire and deputies have little to go on. Near the crime scene, however, Longmire discovers Virgil White Buffalo, a homeless Indian and Vietnam vet who happens to have the girl's purse. Longmire retrieves a photograph from the purse--a photo that reminds him of his first investigation as a Marine detective in Vietnam. Longmire is sure that the two crimes--separated by 40 years--are connected, but old enemies lie in wait to thwart his search for answers.