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Book Review: Crazy Mountain Kiss by Keith McCafferty

Crazy Mountain Kiss, the 4th book in Keith McCafferty's eclectic western mystery series, starts with the protagonist, Sean Stranahan... nowhere to be found. In an interesting literary choice, the Montana private investigator, artist and fly fishing guide doesn't appear until 30 pages into the story, by which time the central mystery has been investigated by series regulars Martha Ettinger and Harold Little Feather.

While Sean is helping friend, cohort and fellow guide Sam Meslik start a winter fly fishing service in Florida, the body of a young girl is found lodged in the chimney of a Forest Service cabin in the Crazy Mountains. The mystery deepens upon his return when the body is identified as Cinderella "Cindy" Huntington, missing daughter of a local woman famous as the spokesperson for a fictional brand of trucks, and it is determined that she was 5 months pregnant at the time of her disappearance. The investigation takes an even oddER turn when Martha and Sean learn that the cabin was used as the primary venue for a "swingers" group called the Mile and a Half High Club and we are introduced to some of that group's eccentric members.

It is here that McCafferty takes some chances with the tone of the story, straying at times toward the slightly kinky, but not moving much beyond the hard PG-13 sexual verbiage typical for these kinds of novels. Perhaps more relevant to readers of the preceding novels, the story moves further from the fishing-centric plots of the first two books continuing the more general "western" themes of the third book. This is, I suppose, understandable, as, from a purely practical standpoint, the market for western-themed mysteries is surely much larger than that for fly fishing-themed mysteries. Still, there is a sense that the fishing aspects are becoming more of an add-on and less a part of the substance of the story.

While the reader has a pretty good idea early on who might have been involved in the death (murder?), the exact nature of the incident and how it played out is revealed methodically and with great skill over the course of the book. There is really no "ahah" moment or malevolent bad guy offering a soliloquy on what he did and why he did it. McCafferty also continues and expands upon his use of Native American imagery and spirituality throughout the book, and if the ultimate payoff for that comes across as a little deus ex machina, well... so be it.

I enjoyed the book, as I do everything McCafferty writes -- fiction and nonfiction -- but I will say that this is probably my least favorite of the four Sean Stranahan books I have read thus far. Parts of the story meander off into tributaries that either don't have a payoff or aren't integrated into the core story; the Florida fishing venture with Sam and Sean, for instance. Maybe it's the setup for a future story, and if so I'll be happy to eat my words, but to introduce that idea at some length and then have it ultimately dismissed in the course of a few sentences seemed like an unnecessary distraction.

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