Stolen Horses »

Dan O’Brien is the author of numerous novels and memoirs, including Buffalo for the Broken Heart and The Contract Surgeon, winners of the Western Heritage Award for best nonfiction in 2001 and for best fiction in 1999, respectively. Buffalo for the Broken Heart was the One Book South Dakota selection for 2009. Equinox: Life, Love, and Birds of Prey, is available in a Bison Books edition.

McDermot, Nebraska, is a pleasant, scenic western cattle town situated in the Pawnee River valley—just the place for people seeking refuge from their hectic city lives. It is also just the place for those who have made their homes on this haunting prairie since the late nineteenth century. Ideal for both, McDermot means everything to those native inhabitants and something very different to those who are looking for a new life.

As the native residents wrestle with the arrival of outsiders, a local journalist uncovers a medical scandal epitomizing the problems facing the divided community. After the death of two men, it falls to the ancient but powerful district attorney to mediate a resolution between the clashing interests of the new and the old West. And the Thurston family, descended from the town’s first citizen, sets out in its own way to fight the forces threatening to destroy it. This is the story of new and old interests colliding, of small western plains towns confronting the forces of “progress.”

Publishers Weekly

Interconnected lives in the small western Nebraska town of McDermot navigate the rocky transition from rustic old ways to new money opportunities and opportunists in the slow-burning latest from O'Brien (Buffalo for the Broken Heart). As the two Thurston brothers--Bob, a self-pitying Vietnam vet, and Steve, an ambitionless carpenter--stand by helplessly while their father sells the family ranch to wealthy lawyer John Tully, Steve's single-mother girlfriend, local newspaper reporter Gretchen Harris, catches wind of a scandal at the local medical clinic. Meanwhile, the Thurston brothers' cousin, Carl Lindquist, a literature professor, returns to town after 30 years' absence to buy a swath of land and settle down, and Erwin Benson, the oldest serving district attorney in the state of Nebraska, is facing a possible re-election campaign against slick newcomer Tully. In excruciatingly gradual increments, O'Brien teases out the entanglements in these relationships; though it's painfully slow at times, once the narrative pieces click into place, the story takes on a stoic urgency as it digs into the raw divide between the old guard and the new. (Sept.)