Michael McGarrity

Backlands continues the story of Patrick Kerney; his ex-wife, Emma; and their young son, Matthew, shortly after the tragic battlefield death of their eldest son, CJ, at the end of World War I. Scarred by the loss of an older brother he idolized, estranged from a father he barely knows, and deeply troubled by the failing health of a mother he adores, eight-year-old Matthew is suddenly and irrevocably forced to set aside his childhood and take on responsibilities...

In the wake of his wife's death in childbirth and the killing of his brother on the West Texas plains, John Kerney is forced to give up his ranch, leave his son behind, and strike out in search of the murdering outlaws and a place to start over. He drifts south hiring on as a hand, until he meets a man who offers him work trailing cattle to the New Mexico Territory and forever changes his life. Spanning the years 1875 to 1918, Hard Country reinvents...

"The grand saga of an American ranching family continues in The Last Ranch, the final, mesmerizing book of New York Times bestseller Michael McGarrity's gripping and richly authentic American West trilogy. When Matthew Kerney returns to his ranch in the beautiful San Andres Mountains after serving in Sicily during World War II, he must not only fight to recover physically and emotionally from a devastating war injury, but he must also battle attempts...

When a fire reveals the body of a woman who vanished from Santa Fe years ago, Police Chief Kevin Kerney finds himself cooperating with his estranged son, a man he hardly knows. The Big Gamble is a multilayered, adrenaline-pumped novel of crime and punishment set against the beauty and pristine majesty of one of our countryUs most magnificent landscapes.

"Detective Clayton Istee investigates New Mexico borderland killings by an elusive Mexican assassin with ties to a drug cartel. In Michael McGarrity's final, propulsive Kevin Kerney novel, the nightmare of the Mexican drug wars spills across the border with the discovery of a couple in a Las Cruces hotel, scalped with their throats cut. Because of the unusual MO, Detective Clayton Istee suspects that the murders are drug related, but a lack of evidence...

Kevin Kerney takes a rare weekend off from his job as deputy chief of the New Mexico State Police to explore 6,400 acres of land he unexpectedly inherited from an old family friend, but he finds himself instead directing a multifaceted investigation when the acreage yields two dead bodies as well as an illegally clear-cut swath of woodland.

McGarrity's novels keep getting richer as they change focus slightly with each new publisher. This novel, the fifth in the series, is the first to be issued by Dutton, McGarrity's third publisher; it's also the most personal book of the series, with Kerney, Deputy Chief of the New Mexico State Police, now married to career U.S. Army officer Lt. Col. Sara Brannon and about to become a millionaire by selling the huge tract of land he inherited in Hermit's...

When a U.S. ambassador's wife is found murdered in her palatial home, Santa Fe police chief Kevin Kerney makes the case his top priority. But before the investigation even gets off the ground, Kerney is railroaded by an FBI team acting under the cloak of national security. Now, as Kerney watches from the sidelines, the crime scene is sanitized, witnesses disappear, and the case is cleared with trumped-up evidence that Kerney just can't buy. No amount...

After years away on the pro rodeo circuit, Johnny Jordan struts into Santa Fe to ask his boyhood friend, Santa Fe Police Chief Kevin Kerney, to serve as a technical advisor on a contemporary Western movie to be filmed along the Mexican border. Kerney agrees and plans a working vacation on location, in a remote area of the state known as the Bootheel, with his wife, Lt. Colonel Sara Brannon, and their three-year-old son, Patrick. But, a dead man on...

"Retired police chief Kevin Kerney returns--this time as the prime suspect in a brutal cold-case murder. A long-unsolved mystery gets a grim new break when the bones of Kim Ward are unearthed in Las Cruces, New Mexico, forty-five years after her disappearance. Suspicion swiftly falls on her old college boyfriend: none other than retired police chief Kevin Kerney. The chief's hopes of clearing his name look bleak in the face of damning evidence compiled...