A Killing Way: A Nate Ross Novel
Former police officer, private investigator, and now award-winning mystery author, J. R. Sanders offers the fourth installment in his Nate Ross novels. A Killing Way follows Stardust Trail (2020), Dead-Bang Fall (2022), and Bring the Night (2023).
Sanders’s protagonist Nate Ross, himself a former police officer, is a no-nonsense PI whose great love in life is his “big red dog,” Monte. Akin to Ross’s character, readers will find Sanders’s crisp prose is uncomplicated and direct. Here, the classic “whodunit,” quick-read plot involves murder, hidden identities, fingerprint evidence, and plenty of twists along the way. And Sanders’s 1930s Los Angeles setting adds distinctive dimensions to the mix, including stolen contemporary artwork and film production sets with a whole slew of “movie cowboys,” the so-called “cowpokes who played the part of bandits and ranch hands in Tinseltown’s B-films by day and haunted the Buscadero,” their favorite tavern, “by night.”
Alongside the fictional characters, attentive readers will find woven in several real-life figures. There is Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), the famous “cowboy artist” who produced more than 2,000 paintings and sculptures of the Old West. Western film star, of Tumbleweeds fame, William S. Hart (1864-1946)—accompanied by his “loyal comrade,” the “pinto pony,” Fritz—is here too. We visit Hart’s Southern California retirement ranch, “La Loma de los Vientos”—or “The Hill of the Winds”—and other locales in and around L.A., from Griffith Park to Belvedere Gardens. Center stage, of course, is Hollywood, always “a place where art imitates life and, more often than not, the other way round,” or, Ross wonders, is it “life imitating art imitating life? Only in L.A.”
