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Bad Company: A Mustang Sally Mystery
 
 
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Bad Company: A Mustang Sally Mystery [Hardcover]

Virginia Swift (Author)
4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)


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Book Description

May 28, 2002

Jubilee Days: Laramie, Wyoming's annual rodeo bash and sin fest. It's a whole week of broncos bucking, guitars twanging, and cash registers ringing. Nobody much wants to spoil the party, not even when a local loser turns up dead in the mountains east of town.

Almost nobody. Sally Adler and Hawk Green, a couple of college professors out for an afternoon hike, find the body, and for Sally and Hawk, murder is anything but academic. Like the victim, Sally's done her time in the glare of the late-night neon lights, and she knows how thin the line can be between honky-tonk angels and lost souls. She's determined to do what she can to see justice. Hawk knows he'd better stay close and keep his eyes open. Sally has a way of attracting the wrong kind of attention.

From the jam-packed barrooms to the wide-open spaces, Sally and Hawk unravel the dark threads of a sinister scheme. It's a race to find the killer before Sally becomes the next victim.


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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Following a well-received debut (2000's Brown-Eyed Girl), the new adventure featuring "Mustang" Sally Adler (for the car, not the horse) and the living jewel called Wyoming is another delectable tale of strong women of the West. Swift gives readers a lot to like: wicked satire of pompous academics, smart but not smart-alecky writing, the achingly beautiful landscape of the eastern Rockies, great sex between grownups old enough to know what they're doing and why and most of all, the dead-on portrayal of a Western town, in this case Laramie, Wyo. (pop. 27,000). A history professor at the University of New Mexico, Swift clearly knows how Westerners act and think. When the going gets tough, they "cowboy up." They say to the government, "Just give me the check and get the hell out." Their idea of fancy Saturday night garb is dress jeans and cowboy boots. They work phrases from country songs into their everyday conversation, and name their children after country singers. When Sally's best friend marries a rodeo rider named Walker Davis, what else would they call their son but Jerry Jeff Walker Davis? The core plot is not complex, but it feels real. Two main threads the rape and murder of a young woman who's no one's candidate for the girl next door and a land swap deal that stinks of greed and corruption even before toxic groundwater is discovered are resolved in a way that poignantly reminds us that sometimes morality has murky edges. All told, this is a refreshing piece of work by a strong new talent.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

After language arts teacher Margo Brown (Why Johnny Died) and her husband discover an old gun buried in their garden, Margo cannot resist investigating. Working with clues from her husband and his ninetyish father, who remembers the 50-year-old unsolved shooting of a local landowner, plus research results from the library and reminiscences from the victim's relatives, Margo manages to ruffle some important feathers. This intriguing puzzle is fleshed out with bucolic details of cooking, gardening, yard work, and gossip in rural Indiana. A pleasant read; for regional and larger mystery collections.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 336 pages
  • Publisher: Harper; 1st edition (May 28, 2002)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0060195541
  • ISBN-13: 978-0060195540
  • Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.9 x 1.3 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,663,023 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Average Customer Review
4.7 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars exciting amateur sleuth, June 9, 2002
This review is from: Bad Company: A Mustang Sally Mystery (Hardcover)
It is Jubilee Days in Laramie, Wyoming and the town is filling up with tourists, cowboys and parties interested in the upcoming rodeo circuits. University of Wyoming history professor Sally Adler and her life partner geology professor Hawk Green want a respite from the crowds so they go hiking in the hills where they find the body of Manette, a cashier at the local supermarket.

She was beaten, raped and shot to death and with the town so crowded with revelers, the sheriff isn't sure if he can solve the case before the Jubilee days come to a close. To complicate matters, twenty one year old Manette was a woman on the prowl, looking for somebody to fill up her night and she wasn't very particular about who it was as long it was male. Sally, a curious mix of sixties liberalism and new millennium pragmatism wants the killer caught and sets out to investigating on her own, making a target of herself along the way.

Readers who like a raunchy, realistically drawn down home heroine will adore the star of BAD COMPANY. The story line moves faster than a running river, taking readers on a ride that is filled with thrills, chills and action. Virginia Swift is a relative newcomer to the mystery genre but with a novel and series like this, she has a bright future ahead of her.

Harriet Klausner

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Intelligent, Originial Mystery, August 17, 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: Bad Company: A Mustang Sally Mystery (Hardcover)
I've read both of the Mustang Sally mysteries this week and it just kills me that I'll have wait a year for the next one to be published. I think that, like Nevada Barr, Virginia Swift is headed for the bestseller lists.
The characters, the setting, and the plot are all complex and interesting yet witty and romantic. It's often said that mystery readers are usually smart people, but it's still a pleasure to read a book that is both completely entertaining and beautifully written. Enjoy!
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars comedy of manners, July 12, 2002
By 
Arnold Kling (Silver Spring, Md USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Bad Company: A Mustang Sally Mystery (Hardcover)
Academic/feminist/singer/sleuth Sally Alder and her companion Hawk Green become involved in two mysteries, one involving a nasty murder and the other involving a questionable land swap. The setting is Laramie, Wyoming, during the crowded, raucous Jubilee Days.

Compared with her first novel, "Brown-eyed Girl," the writing here is more compact. Where "Brown-eyed Girl" was replete with two-page digressions, in "Bad Company" Swift is more apt to toss of a one-liner.

Still, I would recommend reading "Brown-eyed Girl" before "Bad Company." You get a fuller background of the characters, particularly Hawk, who was more richly drawn in the first book. He's rather uninteresting here. In fact, there are points in "Bad Company" where Alder seems to be more intrigued by Scotty Atkins, a detective who is assigned to the murder.

The New York Times accurately describes Swift's writing as a comedy of manners. The plot is merely a scaffolding on which to hang Swift's many observations about the variety of the human species. To enjoy the novel, you have to be amused by incidents such as a nerdy academic slinging post-modernism in a Western saloon.

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Inside This Book (learn more)
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First Sentence:
Sally Alder had never been all that big on the notion that the two sexes were, in some fundamental way, opposites. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
bucking chute, tie plant, white elephant sale, land swap, experimental ethnography
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Jerry Jeff, Molly Wood, Scotty Atkins, Marsh Carhart, Sheldon Stover, Wood's Hole, Happy Jack, Monette Bandy, Sally Alder, Dickie Langham, Herman Schwink, Laramie Range, Devil's Playground, Sam Branch, Maude Stark, Nattie Langham, Albany County, Alice's Restaurant, Dwayne Langham, Golden Eagle, Adolph Schwink, Big Esther, Days Committee, Jim Beam, Laramie High
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