BOOKS

High Country Noir by Kit Miller

Dee Laguerre: strong, savvy, serious, Basque. In his two electrifying Great Basin mysteries, High Desert Malice and Deep Valley Malice, Kirk Mitchell introduces us to a range heroine for our times. Twenty-eight year old Dominica Laguerre is a BLM agent who wields a level six-shooter, a quick mind and a cool intolerance for machismo. Born to the sheep camps of Central Nevada, she straddles the precarious fence between environmental defender and cow county native.

High Desert Malice (Avon; $4.99) kicks off with a mustang massacre followed by the brutal killing of two BLM agents. The historic strife between sheep and cattle ranchers and the real-life despair of a cowman's last days on the range create plenty of sensitive drama as well as likely suspects. But Mitchell steers clear of overt stereotyping and permits Laguerre to draw out the real Nevada personalities.

In Deep Valley Malice (Avon; $4.99), someone bombs the LA Aqueduct, the LAPD swat team charges into Owen's Valley to defend The City's water, and a gaggle of law enforcement agencies elbow in to crack the case. The beehive of suspects with good cause includes Basque separatists, wary Paiutes, and farmers still devastated by the Great Water Rip-Off of the 1920s. This might sound far-fetched until you turn on the morning news for the latest report on the Unabomber and Shinto terrorism. The book lacks a good laugh, but the ironies speak volumes. And I find Mitchell's down to earth characters preferable to the phony smart asses that populate so much gonzo literature these days. As for suspense, the scene where Laguerre is swept down a pitch-dark aqueduct with a killer, a bomb, and a dead body rivals the best of Tony Hillerman. Mitchell doesn't beat us with a moral. But he does tackle concerns endemic to the Great Basin: the sagebrush wars, urban growth, water grabs, overgrazed rangeland, and racism. And like any good mystery writer, he holds up a mirror and illuminates the region's dark shadows.

"What's that disgusting smell?" by Jon Christensen

That's what my two-year-old daughter wanted to know as we waded into the Great Salt Lake. Utah friends laughed, "Only visitors go there." Images of the Great Salt Lake (Utah Museum of Fine Arts; $10) shows why it's worth a visit. images book cover
A catalog from a centennial art exhibit, the book has beautiful photos and paintings and a great essay by historian Dean May that explains why Utahns turned away from the lake centuries ago and remain Wasatch Mountain people to this day. "The Great Salt Lake offers a wilderness experience, not a beach party," May writes, "and no amount of promotion and development will change that." The catalog is a good read and good looking. Still it's not the same without the smell.

Lost in the Great Basin byJon Christensen

Chaucher's Canterbury Tales is said to be the beginning of the novel as we know it. The Lost Coast by Steven Nightingale was inspired by Chaucer's frame narrative, where pilgrims on the way to Canterbury tell each other stories. But The Lost Coast (St. Martins; $21.95) shows that stringing some stories along the frame of a plot does not make a novel. The author's duty is not only to set some characters on the road but to provide a reason for readers to come along. The stories that Chaucer's pilgrim's told had endings. These tales wander across the Great Basin but go nowhere, wasting a prodigious wealth of words. They try way too hard for sensuality and meaning, but these qualities vanish in a wordy haze. In this respect, The Lost Coast is something like the Great Basin where it is set. Reading it is like staring into space in the Big Smokey Valley with nothing in particular worth looking at. The fantasies inside your own mind begin to shape the landscape and the characters you imagine inhabit it.

Trickster tales by David Lukas

Wild Indians and Other Creatures by Adrian C. Louis (University of Nevada Press; $20). Sharp clever language and a versatile wit ranging from terribly sad to hilarious combine powerfully in this brilliant collection of stories. Louis is a mixed-blood Indian who grew up in Lovelock,Nev., but these stories are set on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. These tales abound in absurd comedy and politically irreverent topics as Coyote, Raven, and Bear join a host of humans to stumble through a series of misadventures and near-life experiences. What makes these stories so powerful is that they are not simply mythic and comic, but tragic in the reality of reservation life they portray. In that way they hint at a way out. These are trickster tales at their very best, raw, emotional, hard-hitting social commentary, in the hands of a master storyteller.

Reno's context by David Lukas

Geologic and Natural History Tours in the Reno Area by Becky Wemar Purkey and Larry J. Garside (Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology, $10.95). This encyclopedic but succinct little book present four tours of the historic, cultural, natural and geologic landscape around Reno. Through precise mile-by-mile descriptions, photographs, and diagrams, this guide transforms the landscape from an everyday drive into an adventure in time travel.

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