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The Leaning Land is one of the later Gabe Wager novels, with the Denver homicide detective working a case that takes him out of the city and into the Colorado high country, where a county courthouse is literally sinking into the ground because of decades-old underground mining works. The case involves the death of a county clerk whose office was investigating the engineering history of the mine.
Rex Burns has always been better at the Colorado geography than almost any other writer of his generation. The high-country sections of this novel are rendered with the kind of patient detail that I would expect from a longtime resident, and the political dynamics of a small mountain county are handled with care.
Four stars. Recommended to readers who like their regional crime fiction with serious geography. The Wager series deserves more attention than it has had.
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