The Butterflies of Grand Canyon » (Original)

Margaret Erhart is the author of five novels. Her fourth, Crossing Bully Creek, won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and in several anthologies, including The Best American Spiritual Writing 2005. Her commentaries have aired on National Public Radio. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, and teaches creative writing to elementary school students. She is a hiking guide in Grand Canyon.

Set against the backdrop of the brooding and sensual canyon, a young woman's heart awakens and a decades-old mystery is solved

When Jane Merkle arrives in the tiny town of Flagstaff, Arizona, with her much older husband on a summer day in 1951, she hasn't any idea that her life is about to change forever. After all, one of Jane's favorite sayings is "When in Rome, remember that you're from St . Louis." But over a summer spent with her sister-in-law, Dotty, and Dotty's lepidopterist husband, Oliver, in a village perched on the rim of the Grand Canyon, Jane discovers her latent ability with a butterfly net and her attraction to a handsome young ranger. Meanwhile, an unidentified skeleton is found on the premises of one of the village's most cantankerous citizens. With the help-and hindrance-of a colorful cast of historical characters, including an eccentric botanist who moonlights as an amateur sleuth, the murder mystery that has haunted the town for years is solved.

In her latest novel, set in the quintessential landscape of the Southwest, Margaret Erhart weaves history, science, and an intimate knowledge of the human heart to tell a fast-paced tale.

Publishers Weekly

Erhart (Bully Creek) steers clear of the earnest obsessions that weighed heavily on her early books in her fifth outing, a quaint novel of the American West enlivened by a quirky mystery. En route from St. Louis to visit her in-laws in Flagstaff, Ariz., young Jane Merkle meets two women botanists on the train. Their paths cross again after Jane, having lost her luggage and traded her fancy dresses for dungarees and a butterfly net, becomes enthralled with her new surroundings and ranger Euell Wigglesworth. As it turns out, Elzada, one of the botanists, is in town to help investigate a 13-year-old murder, and as the mystery unfolds and dark secrets come to light, the canyon works its magic on Jane. Erhart, a river and hiking guide, teases her readers about the sweet silliness of human affairs in the face of the magnitude of nature, and the cleverly plotted mystery becomes a lark of a vehicle for Erhart's thoughtful prose. This novel is light and agreeable, touched with just the right amount of awe at the splendors of nature. (Dec.)