With 1996's Tularosa, his first book about former New Mexico cop Kevin Kerney, onetime Santa Fe chief of detectives Michael McGarrity landed on lots of Top 10 lists and bedside tables. His latest is even better--it is a complex and exciting mystery, full of beautifully sketched people and moments, written in a style as cool and clear as spring water. Still recovering from the leg and stomach wounds he got at the end of Tularosa, Kerney is living in a rented house trailer and working as a temporary forest ranger in the Gila Wilderness in the southwest corner of New Mexico. All he wants to do is put aside enough money to buy a small ranch, but events--the poaching of protected animals, the murder of a Mexican citizen, an outbreak of local militia terrorism--conspire to take advantage of his highly developed detection and survival skills.