Named Best Mystery Thriller in the 2021 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards"Part mystery; part quirky, darkly funny, mayhem-filled thriller; and part meditation on what it means to 'own' land, artifacts, and the narrative of history in the West . . . A fast-paced, highly entertaining hybrid of Tony Hillerman and Edward Abbey." --Kirkus ReviewsAnthropologist Sophia Shepard is researching the impact of tourism on cultural sites in a remot...

"Todd Robert Petersen is crazy–talented, and the wild, weird, hilarious stories of It Needs to Look Like We Tried are just what’s called for in these bizarre, frightening times." —Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls and TrajectoryA domino chain of failures draws Todd Robert Petersen's characters together in these interconnected stories, despite hopes, dreams, and their best–laid plansEveryone has a dream, an ide...

The Book of Mormon prophet Nephi describes the journey to eternal life as going through a gate of ordinances and traveling a “straight and narrow path.” Twenty-three authors took that gospel roadmap passage as a prompt to write “a Mormon story.” They responded with a surprisingly wide range of realistic and fantastic tales. Many are human reactions to unexpected steps on the path: a lifetime of faith in a patriarchal blessing’s unfulfilled promise, a survivor of violence calling a divided ...

Anthropologist Sophia Shepard is researching the impact of tourism on cultural sites in a remote national monument on the Utah-Arizona border when she crosses paths with two small-time criminals. The Ashdown brothers were hired to steal maps from a "collector" of Native American artifacts, but their ineptitude has alerted the local sheriff to their presence. Their employer, a former lobbyist seeking lucrative monument land that may soon be open to energy exploration, sends a fixer to clean...