The Leaning Land
About this ebook
Pressure is rising at Colorado's Squaw Point Reservation, and the area is about to explode. After a federal agent is murdered and several park rangers are attacked, a mess of federal agencies descends on the area, hopelessly muddying the situation. To put a local face on the investigation, the FBI recruits Denver homicide detective Gabe Wager. When he arrives on the reservation, he finds a local populace that's too frightened to talk to the police. A survivalist militia called the Constitutional Posse has taken control of the area, and threatens harm to anyone stupid enough to question its agenda. When Wager pushes against the Posse, they push back, giving him a savage thrashing. To beat them, he'll have to remind the locals that no militia is as terrifying as a determined cop.
About the author
Rex Burns (b. 1935) is the author of numerous thrillers set in and around Denver, Colorado. Born in California, he served in the Marine Corps and attended Stanford University and the University of Minnesota before becoming a writer. His Edgar award-winning first novel, The Alvarez Journal (1975), introduced Gabe Wager, a Denver police detective working in an organized crime unit. Burns continued this hard-boiled series through ten more novels, concluding it with 1997's The Leaning Land. One of the Wager mysteries, The Avenging Angel (1983), was adapted as a feature film, Messenger of Death, starring Charles Bronson. Burns's other series centers on Devlin Kirk, a Denver private detective whose specialty is industrial security. Introduced in Suicide Season (1989), Kirk appeared in two more novels. Once a monthly mystery review columnist in the Rocky Mountain News, Burns has also written nonfiction and hosted the Mystery Channel's Anatomy of a Mystery. He lives and writes in Boulder, Colorado.