cover image TIE-FAST COUNTRY

TIE-FAST COUNTRY

Robert Flynn, . . Texas Christian Univ., $24.50 (354pp) ISBN 978-0-87565-244-3

Fractured family relationships are as tangled and dangerous as a ball of barbed wire in this folksy western novel by Spur Award– winner Flynn (The Devils Tiger; Wanderer Springs; etc.). This is certainly not a typical western; it reads more like an episode of Dallas, with an injection of verisimilitude. Chance Carter is a Florida TV station manager thoroughly corrupted by shallow entertainment, manipulative news and hatred for his grandmother Clarista, "a woman who killed two men and drove her daughter and grandson from her house." When he gets a call from Texas about the ailing woman, he sees it as an opportunity to put her in a nursing home. However, Clarista is a tough, smart Texas cattle rancher: she is not about to be corralled in a nursing home, and Chance is in for a big surprise when he arrives at the run-down ranch wearing tassle loafers and pleated pants. She puts the city boy to work mending fences, herding cattle, roping and riding. At first he is not happy with how the visit is turning out, but eventually he learns the real reasons his grandmother shot two men, why his own mother left home and why he is such a jerk. He realizes that Clarista is a good ol' gal, and that maybe he was wrong to hate her after all. The narrative alternates between past and present, as Clarista tells of the early days of cattle ranching from 1900 to the 1940s and Chance describes his visit to the ranch. The prose is pedestrian, but this is a funny, comfortable tale with enough barbs and thorns to remind us that life is not at all like television. Southwest author tour. (Sept.)