HEAD WOUNDS

Retired Santa Fe police chief Kevin Kerney gets only a minor role in his 14th appearance. Considering what the leading characters are up to, that’s a lucky break for him.

It all begins at a motel where James Goggin and Lucy Nautzile have been scalped after their throats were surgically cut, presumably by Estavio Trevino, a professional assassin who prefers to be called El Jefe. As if the carnage isn’t disturbing enough, John Cosgrove, the night clerk who reports discovering the bodies to Kerney’s son, Deputy Clayton Istee, of the Doña Ana County Sheriff’s Office, vanishes and promptly turns up with his own throat cut. It’s the beginning of a pattern that plays out all over the tribal lands of New Mexico and environs: First characters are introduced by name, placed in a thickly imagined web of relatives, and given a backstory, then they’re violently dispatched. Ever since stealing $200,000 from a tribal casino, the first two victims had been on the run—not from the law, to whom the theft was never reported, but from a mélange of gangsters, hirelings, informants, and paid killers who now all come rushing into Clayton’s ken. Soon after agreeing to join undercover DEA agent Bernard Harjo in a journey to El Jefe, an encounter the all-knowing killer plans to end by ransoming his visitors, Clayton shoots El Jefe’s adopted son, Fernando Olguin, in self-defense, putting himself squarely in the assassin’s crosshairs, where he’s got plenty of company. Gang leaders fight rival gang leaders, dirty cops go up against even dirtier cops, and it all ends with the 70th birthday party of Kevin Kerney. Remember him?

Underneath all the chaotic plotting and crossplotting, McGarrity’s New Mexico seethes with life.