Murder in the Wild Horse Territory
A murder at a wild horse round up rocks a small community that revolves around a cafe on a lonely highway. The waitress is keeping track of things and serving green chile cheese burgers.
If you were there...
If you had been sitting on the corner bar-stool that morning, you would have seen Aletta at her laptop, watching a YouTube video, typing through the tears running down her face. You wouldn’t have thought her pretty, dressed in jeans, boots, a crimson-colored apron, shoulder length brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses, but you would have guessed from those fingers flying on the keyboard that she was smart. You would not have noticed the other waitress and the cook smoking cigarettes outside the back door. If you looked over your shoulder and out the window, you might have noticed the man in the parking lot, standing by his truck, talking on his cell phone and eating a hamburger and fries. You then would have noticed the white government plates and his khaki shirt that marked him as a government employee.
Of course if you (or he) were on the barstool, the waitress would have waited on you instead of paying attention to the screen, served you a meal, refilled your drink, made a little polite chat to test if you wanted to talk to her, and if you did, she would have gotten you to tell her your whole life story. You would have been lulled into verbosity by the rare pleasure of engaging with an active listener, eager to learn what makes you tick and makes you special. You might have surprised yourself at how much you were willing to reveal to a stranger. She had a lot of practice getting strangers to open up as if they were library books and then after they paid the bill and drove away, she would make notes in her journal because she wanted to become a writer someday and she would need characters. This café was a gold-mine of characters. But you weren’t there to be waited on, the fellow was on the phone with his girlfriend, the highway in front of the cafe was momentarily quiet, the big take-out order for the BLM had been picked up, and everything was prepped for the coming lunch rush, so she wrote and cried.
COLLAPSEI started reading Beyond the Roadhouse with absolutely no expectations, and shortly found myself completely drawn into the story.
Dr. Barlow-Irick really spent time developing the characters. It's fun to know that some of the characters are taken from real life, some embellished, and some totally fictional. It was towards the end that I finally realized which were which.
Without revealing a spoiler, I will say that one character ended up being anti-climatic, thought he might have had more time in the spotlight.
As a bonus, you will learn about the plight of the wild Mustangs from an insider's point of view. Not many understand that, and it is important to know.
Don't let the length of the book discourage you. Every page is worth reading.