Synopsis

Santa Fe Police Chief Kevin Kerney travels to a California ranch looking to buy some prime quarter horse breeding stock; instead, he finds himself the prime suspect in a possible homicide when a guest at the ranch, Clifford Spalding, is found dead. Confronted by a determined cop unwilling to let him off the hook, Kerney decides to conduct his own investigation. As he digs into the victim's background, he learns that Spalding's ex-wife refuses to believe that her son, a soldier killed in Vietnam some thirty years ago, is dead. 

"In Spanish, Sangre de Cristo meant 'blood of Christ'.  Tradition had it that the mountains were so named by the Spanish settlers because of the deep red color that washed over the peaks at sunset.  To the native people who had lived at the foot of the mountains for hundreds of years before the Spanish arrived, they were 'the place where the sun danced'.  To Kerney, both names perfectly described the mountains."

"Evergreen trees scattered across the grounds interrupted the stark lines of gray headstones.  The brown earth, almost barren except for sparse native grasses, seemed in somber harmony with the scattered trees."

"Only one highway traversed the Canadian Gorge, a state road that ran from the town of Wagon Mound to the village of Roy.  A tangle of canyons and mesas, the gorge dropped off the high plains of north-eastern New Mexico into breaks over a thousand feet deep in places.  Cut by rivers and streams, most of the Canadian was remote and wild, virtually empty of people, sprinkled with the remains of failed Hispanic and Anglo settlements"

"Slow Kill", 2004

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Location Map

Interactive maps - click on a place name for the link

Locale

Northern New Mexico centres on the magnificent landscapes of the Rio Grande Valley, which contains its two finest cities - the artists' colony and winter resort of Taos, with its nearby pueblo, and Santa Fe, the adobe-fronted capital. More than a dozen Pueblo villages can be found in the mountainous area between the two ... more.  

Santa Fe:

See here

Taos:

• The Pueblo at Taos is one of New Mexico's authentic examples of the survival of Pueblo Indian life, literally unchanged since 1540 when Coronado saw buildings and customs closely resembling those which can be seen today ... more.
• Also see:
  Taos History Association

Galisteo

La Cienaga

...Nowhere was this antipathy toward the valet parking culture felt more strongly than in a historic community of some 400 families 11 miles south of Santa Fe called La Cienega.

Just west of Interstate 25, within eyesight of the New Mexico State Prison and the Downs of Santa Fe race track, La Cienega ("the marsh") is a rural collection of re- and un-furbished adobes, mobile homes and post-hippie eclecticism. La Cienegans today might be prison workers, potters, welders, attorneys, accountants, teachers.

A few of the names on the battered mailboxes are those of the first European explorers in the Southwest: Montaño, Rivera, Romero and the C. de Bacas, after Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca, who came through the Southwest in the 1530s. Once largely Hispanic, the community is now about half-Anglo after two decades of word-of-mouth discovery by comfortably transient gringos.

A rust-colored mesa graced with petroglyphs from the 13th century overlooks the village, and rutted dirt roads wind past tiny plots of garlic, chiles and calabacitas, "little pumpkins." While native La Cienegans no longer depend upon agriculture and livestock as their grandparents did, they are still forged from rural Hispanic traditions, foremost of which may be the appreciation and protection of their 300-year-old irrigation ditches called acequias (pronounced ah-sáy-key-ahs).[Text from 1993 article from High Country News]. more...

Reviews:

Publishers Weekly - July, 2004

As in McGarrity's eight previous Kerney novels (Everyone Dies; etc.), the author excels at detailing police procedures as well as creating a homespun, wry tone that suits setting and characters. 

Booklist - August, 2004

Santa Fe police chief Kevin Kerney is visiting a Santa Barbara ranch, looking to buy quarter horses, when he stumbles on the dead body of another guest staying at the ranch. Kerney looks like a prime suspect, which prompts him to make a few inquiries of his own. The trail leads Kerney on a crisscrossing journey around the country, with a stop-off at FBI headquarters in Virginia, near where is wife, Sara, a career army officer, is stationed at the Pentagon. As in the past episodes in this long-running series, McGarrity juggles police procedural and domestic storylines effectively, drawing readers into the dynamics of Kerney's long-distance marriage just as he unerringly charts the painstaking investigative work that defines the lives of real-world cops. Precise realism remains McGarrity's hallmark; his own experience as a deputy sheriff and as a therapist working with abuse victims informs his fiction on every page.  This not a series for those who hope to find either high-octane excitement or existential angst in their cop novels.  McGarrity deals in the quotidian reality of a cop's life, and he does so with remarkable verisimilitude.

Di Bingham - August, 2004

Slow Kill races from West coast to East coast, as Kerney tries to find the answers to a thirty-year old mystery and extricate himself from a situation that could ruin his career.

In Kerney's 9th outing, the author has created a more than worthy entry into the series and continues to demonstrate his expertise with police culture as well as their investigative procedures.  His known ability to evoke vivid pictures of the landscape he is describing is used well as he brings both East and West Coast locales alive.

Michael's plotting in this book leads the reader breathlessly through the storyline with both East Coast and West Coast sharing the spotlight and Kerney in the centre of the web piecing the threads together.  If serendipity brings him into the picture, it is Kerney's ability to think outside the square that directs the investigations of both Sara, his Army career wife, San Luis Opiso Sheriff's Department Sergeant Ellie Lowery and Sergeant Ramona Pino of his own Santa Fe department as he works to prove he is not involved and to bring all the threads to their startling conclusion.

La Cienaga

Canada de los Alamos (and here - go to 1768 entry)

Galisteo Inn (Historic building of Galisteo)

Drought in New Mexico

Fort Bayard