Another Man’s Ground

In Booth’s appealing sequel to 2016’s The Branson Beauty, Hank Worth, the appointed sheriff of Missouri’s Branson County, must cope with his first election fight against longtime deputy Gerald Tucker, deal with a land dispute between Vern Miles and Jasper Kinney, and grapple with the four degenerate Taylor brothers. The abundant slippery elm trees that grow on both the Miles and Kinney properties are the catalyst for almost everything. Thieves have stripped Miles’s elms, killing the trees and robbing him of the valuable medicinal bark. When Hank begins to investigate, he runs into a stone wall talking to Kinney, but he identifies one of the Taylor brothers as involved in the elm-stripping racket. Meanwhile, he helps rescue an illegal immigrant who has fallen into a sinkhole on Kinney’s land. Hank’s problems multiply when a child’s skeleton is found in the sinkhole. Booth’s affectionate treatment of the decent and shrewd people of Branson and Worth makes this a series worth following. [em]Agent: Jim McCarthy, Dystel & Goderich Literary Management. (July) [/em]