The Lion Hunter

Lanny Klegg goes by the book. He's a straight-laced law enforcement officer for Arizona's Game and Fish Department, and his job is to track down a bounty hunter who is illegally killing mountain lions for renegade ranchers. Silas Garner is a cowboy born 100 years too late, and he's so methodical and arrogant as a hunter and houndsman that he will be easy to catch in the act of killing the big cats. But Lanny's got his conflicts: He was raised in a ranching family and he understands why ranchers want the lions dead. He's haunted by the ghost of his cousin and best friend and driven by his cousin's lover, an overzealous environmental attorney who wants Garner's killing to stop. And he's distractedly in love with a beautiful wildland firefighter named Frida, who's got ghosts of her own. His biggest conflict, though, is that he owes his life to Garner, who once pulled him and Frida out of a freak wildfire inferno. But he's got his job and his principles, even if sticking to them may cost him the love of his life. And as both men track their prey, the game warden and the lion hunter discover that they have equally compelling moral codes, and they struggle to hold on to them through an emotional chase across Arizona's wildest country, into the courtroom and back out onto the landscape they love. The Lion Hunter is based on real-life environmental cases and issues of Arizona in the 1990s. *** Michael Kiefer's third book is a novel of cold beauty, a tale of men consumed by hungers and obsessions they can neither understand nor resist. In prose as elegantly haunting as the image of the animal of the title, the Lion Hunter takes the reader on a journey into the American absolute, a place of pure passion and need. --Barry Graham, author of The Book of Man and The Wrong Thing *** The ground of Arizona asks hard questions and swats away easy answers. Michael Kiefer's The Lion Hunter takes you to the places where the cities fade away and the lions and the men who kill lions hold their teach-ins. It is about a dying breed of men chasing the ghost of themselves inside the whispered freedom of the lions. You'll envy both breeds no matter what your politics. --Charles Bowden, author of Murder City, Down by the River and Blues for Cannibals