PICNIC IN THE RUINS

The fourth novel by Petersen is part mystery; part quirky, darkly funny, mayhem-filled thriller; and part meditation on what it means to "own" land, artifacts, and the narrative of history in the West.

Sophia Shepard is a Princeton anthropology Ph.D. student whose outspokenness has resulted in a kind of exile to remote southern Utah, where she's giving talks to busloads of visitors and studying tourist impacts on Native American sites. In Kanab she crosses paths with the Ashdowns, two sinister brothers, criminals who've botched a burglary, hastily half-covered the mess they made, and absconded with one of the artifact maps they were supposed to deliver. Soon a ruthless fixer—he's an ex–stage magician, the kind of amusing and fanciful touch that elevates this book—is on the Ashdowns' trail, and when Sophia stumbles across the brothers trying to excavate a back-country Paiute site with a stolen backhoe, hell breaks loose. Soon she—along with a roguish Department of the Interior agent she's befriended and a German dermatologist embarked on a hybrid of tourist jaunt and vision quest that has left him lost and disoriented in the desert—is being hunted by the fixer, too. Along the way they, and we, encounter a cybertech pioneer who's now a high-tech hermit; a famed video game deviser; a recently divorced small-town sheriff; a widow suffering the beginnings of dementia; and more. Petersen keeps piling on plot twists, eccentric characters, and well-described settings, and beneath the plot's pandemonium there's an intriguing meditation on "authenticity," on "ownership," and on the legacy of violence in the remote West.

A fast-paced, highly entertaining hybrid of Tony Hillerman and Edward Abbey.