Books Set in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming

Book Summary

In the winter of 1983, superstorms battered the west, followed by a massive snowmelt that threatened the Glen Canyon Dam at the head of the Grand Canyon. While engineers and federal officials scrambled to prevent a catastrophic dam failure, rescuers scrambled to evacuate rafters by helicopter, and future launches were forbidden until the waters were under control. 

However, Kenton Grua saw an opportunity. The floodwaters could work as a hydraulic slingshot, assuring his place as a new record-holder for the fastest trip down 277 miles of whitewater through the canyon. He was already known as being fearless, but this was unlike anything anyone had ever attempted. 

Book Summary

CEO Izabelle is preparing for the most important presentation of her career at a Sedona resort. She’s known for being independent and doing everything without assistance, but then she runs into a handsome, yet awkward, stranger who has the expertise she needs. 

Jake has been sent for mandatory time away from the office, and they won’t even let him log in to the company network. He’s going stir-crazy until he runs into his dream woman, twice. When she asks for his help, he can’t find the words to explain why that’s a bad idea. 

Izabelle and Jake both do their best to resist the urge to mix business and pleasure, but how long can they keep things strictly business? 

Book Summary

When a half-Apache boy named Edgar is run over by a mail truck, he miraculously survives, but the incident changes the path of his life. When authorities discover that he’s mostly orphaned, he’s sent to a boarding school for Native American orphans, which is not a nice place to be. 

Eventually, he’s sent to foster care with a dysfunctional Mormon family. Despite his difficulties and lack of consistent family, Edgar’s goodness remains. He’s determined to find and forgive the man driving the mail truck. 

Book Summary

This riveting non-fiction takes you to the American West during the Civil War. While plenty has been written about the South during this period, it wasn’t the only region of conflict. In the territory that later became Arizona & New Mexico, there was a three-sided fight between the Union, the Confederacy, and several tribes, including the Navajo and Apache. 

The book shares the history of nine individuals, including a Texas legislator, a Union Army wife, a Navajo weaver, and a gold miner. Each of the nine demonstrates the difference individual actions can make amid a larger battle. The book is based on their letters, diaries, military records, photographs, and more. 

Book Summary

While the first world war raged in 1918, the world was also fighting a second battle against the Spanish Flu. In Denver, schools were turned into hospitals, and horse-drawn wagons must continually collect corpses from the streets. Sisters Helen and Lutie are new Denver residents, moving after the death of their parents in Iowa.

Nurse Helen has found a new beau who is a doctor, and Lutie works in advertising at a chic store. To help make ends meet, they have a tenant in the basement of their tidy home. However, when she passes from the flu, they find themselves unexpected caretakers for her young daughter, Dorothy. Their lives take another turn when Lutie arrives home from work to see Dorothy’s father dead in their kitchen. Worse, Helen is standing over him with an ice pick. 

The sisters devise a plan to leave him in the street and hope he’s mistaken for yet another flu victim.

Book Summary

Looking for an eerie mystery that’s perfect for book lovers wanting to read something a bit haunting around Halloween?

This highly-rated debut novel follows a bookshop employee named Lydia, who ends up investigating the suicide of one of her bookshop regulars. As Lydia delves into his past, she also uncovers a buried memory from her own violent childhood.

This is a twisty crime thriller with a very creative puzzle element that will keep readers guessing.

Book Summary

Set in the fictional eastern high plains town of Holt, Colorado, this novel centers around several different characters that span four generations in a small town. A high school teacher is raising his two sons alone after their mother leaves. A pregnant teenage girl has been evicted by her mother. And two elderly bachelor brothers live together out in the country, continuing to work their family homestead.

Book Summary

The Padgett family’s marble-mining company dominates the fictional town of Moonstone. Sylvie’s father works for them, and she knows the workers are discontent with how they are treated. When she leaves her mountain cabin to work for the Padgetts in their manor, she’s in awe of the luxury they live in.

While the Padgetts express lofty philosophical ideals, Sylvie notices the contrast between the talk and the real-life labor practices that created the Padgett fortune. Their servants, the Gradys, are formerly enslaved people who are also aware of the hypocrisy. The Gradys plan to leave the Padgetts and form a new utopian community on the Colorado prairie.

Outside the manor, labor leader Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, is stirring up the quarry workers. The newspaper editor is also involved and regularly publishes unflattering accounts of the Padgett Company. Sylvie is stuck in the middle, with conflicting loyalties, until she is forced to choose sides.

Book Summary

The small New Mexico town of Entrada de la Luna has a lot of challenges, from poverty and poor healthcare to broken marriages. It’s the kind of town that kids strive to leave when they grow up. Which is why Miguel Torres jumps at the chance when he sees an ad for a position caring for two small boys in a different town. But he never expected to end up working for a woman like Rachel Rothstein.

Rachel is a frustrated artist from New York. She was hoping that New Mexico would give her a fresh start, but it has yet to solve any of her problems. As he learns about the Jewish faith from Rachel’s family, Miguel recognizes many of the traditions from his own Catholic community.

Through historical vignettes dating back to the Spanish Inquisition, a story unfolds about a community of “Crypto Jews” – Catholics who, in the 1990s present-day setting of the novel, observe these Jewish traditions without knowing anything about the origin of the traditions or their own Jewish ancestry.

Book Summary

The small town of Del Sol, New Mexico has always been known for its fry-an-egg-on-cement summers and strong cups of coffee. Newly elected Sheriff Sunshine Vicram, recently returned to town after her parents nominated her for the role. Historically the biggest crime wave in town involved an elderly flasher named, Doug, so Sunshine certainly never expected the town to suddenly become the focal point of a nationwide manhunt.

A teenage girl is missing and a kidnapper is on the loose. In addition to a major crime to solve, there is also trouble at Sunshine’s daughter’s new school, not to mention a kidnapped prized rooster named Puff Daddy. And now the manhunt has brought a sexy US Marshall named Levi to town, making it even harder for Sunshine to keep her cool.

Book Summary

After spending years in academia, Jodi Luna left Boston and returned home to New Mexico to take a position as a game warden. Determined to protect the land her family has called home for generations, she nabs poachers in her first week on the job.

Things quickly take a dangerous turn when the poacher retaliates by stalking Jodi and her teenage daughter. The cat-and-mouse game through rugged New Mexico leads Jodi to a terrorist group of white supremacists. Their new recruits are kidnapping women of color to prove their mettle to the leader of the organization.

When she can’t get any cooperation from the local sheriff, Jodi teams up with a young deputy named Ashley. Together they are determined to use their knowledge of the land, and their commitment to its people, to take down the terrorist network.

Book Summary

Gabby’s dad abandoned her and her mother when she was just a baby. Twenty-nine years later, the last thing she expects is to meet him the day of her mother’s funeral. Not only does he show up wanting to get to know her – he also wants to give her a house. Gabby is not ready to forgive him, but she really needs the money, so she accepts the house under two conditions. The first is that she can sell it whenever she wants. The second is that accepting the house doesn’t mean she accepts him.

Gabby hires a contractor to help her prepare the house for a quick sale, but things quickly get more complicated. As she becomes acquainted with the town and with these two new men in her life, she begins to learn more about herself than she thought possible.

Book Summary

Lily Wilder’s father was a notorious treasure hunter – a profession that drained their bank accounts and caused him to sell their beloved family ranch in Wyoming. Lily, however, has finally found a way to turn her father’s passion into something that pays the bills. She uses his hand-drawn maps to guide tourists on fake treasure hunts through the red rock canyons of southern Utah. The last thing she expects is for Leo Grady – the man she once loved – to show up on one of her tours with his crazy crew of friends.

Leo is equally surprised to see Lily, but his feelings on the matter differ from hers. While she’d like to get him lost in the wilderness and leave him there, he’d love nothing more than to reconnect with Lily and finally make things right between them.

But when the trip deep into the isolated and dangerous mazes of Canyonlands goes terribly wrong, Lily starts to question whether her father might have been right all along – maybe there really is hidden treasure out there. But is it worth risking their lives for?

Book Summary

Ivy and her husband are raising their two children in a bungalow in one of the oldest neighborhoods in Salt Lake City, tucked right at the base of the massive Wasatch Mountains. She loves everything about her quaint home, from the old porch swing to the ornate tiles and the heirloom rose bushes. Ivy believes that this home will be the place where her family enjoys their “happily ever after.” But when her husband dies unexpectedly, she’s left tackling home improvement projects alone while striving to be strong for her kids.

As she works to rebuild her home and her life, she begins uncovering clues about five of its former female owners, including a young Mormon who was torn between her heart and her anti-polygamist beliefs, a Greek immigrant during WWII, and a single mother in the 1960s.

Book Summary

We are huge fans of writing duo Christina Lauren, so we were surprised to discover this YA title from them that we hadn’t heard of before. 

Tanner Scott’s family relocated from progressive California to conservative Utah three years ago. Life in Provo (home to BYU) is complicated enough as a half-Jewish, half-lapsed Mormon teenager, so Tanner – who was openly bisexual at his previous school, decides to go back into the closet at Provo High. Now, in his senior year, he is looking forward to attending an out-of-state college next year, where he can once again feel free to be himself.

He fully intends to coast through his final semester of high school classes, until his best friend, Autumn, dares him to take a prestigious honors seminar where students draft an entire book in just four months. And his final semester plans are pushed even further off track when Tanner finds himself falling in love with Sebastian Brother, the class mentor who sold his seminar novel to a major publishing house the year before. He’s also the son of an LDS Bishop.

Book Summary

Celine is a 68-year-old private investigator and artist who works out of her apartment at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge. She’s elegant and aristocratic, and she’s made a career of tracking down missing persons and reuniting families.

A young woman named Gabriela seeks Celine’s help to discover the truth about her father, Paul, a famed wildlife photographer who went missing decades ago near the Montana-Wyoming border. It’s been assumed that Paul died from a grizzly attack, but his body was never found. Gabriela wants answers. When Celine and her husband, Pete, head to Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park to investigate, it soon becomes clear that they are being followed and that someone does not want them to reopen this case.

Book Summary

Published in 2004, this is the first in a series of 19 books in the Walt Longmire Mysteries series. Sheriff Walt Longmire thinks his 25-year tenure in Wyoming is winding down when a young man is found at the edge of the Cheyenne reservation. Was his death payback for the assault of a young Cheyenne girl two years earlier? Throughout the series, you’ll see Longmire’s investigations and relationships with lifelong friend Henry Standing Bear and Deputy Victoria Moretti. 

This is a sequential series of modern westerns, with each book building on the others and filling in gaps, so it’s ideal to read this series in order. However, each book is also a standalone mystery, and the author provides enough character background to make every installment work as a standalone if necessary.

Book Summary

This biographical non-fiction brings rich detail to the life of Crazy Horse, the Lakota chief who led the stand at the Battle of Little Big Horn. Most historical accounts of these battles and others are written from the side of the US soldiers, making this a worthy read as we experience the events from the point of view of the Lakota. 

Instead of focusing on the actual combat of individual battles, the book digs into the bigger picture and consequences of the battles. Overall, it presents a balanced view of a man who had many strengths, but some faults as well.

Book Summary

Originally published in The New Yorker in 1997, and later adapted into an award winning movie of the same title, this 55-page short-story can be read as a stand-alone, or you may want to read Annie Proulx’s entire 1999 Wyoming short-story collection, titled Close Range.

Brokeback Mountain tells the story of two ranch hands who first meet while working on a range one summer. Their attraction to one another is casual at first, but eventually grows deeper. Both marry and have kids – “because that’s what cowboys do” – but as they reunite time and again over the years, their relationship becomes the most important thing in their lives. This is a dangerous affair for two cowboys in a violent and intolerant world.