REVIEW

Dave Knop's "Mining Sacred Ground" is a story richly told, about people we care about, in a setting we've all seen, and that answers the most important question readers always ask: What happens next? Knop is uniquely sensitive to the cultural and historic issues he so deftly presents. His new book shares, in the best sense of 21st Century fiction, the sense of injustice, the absurdity, and the richness of the world he paints. You cannot read this book without a sense of looking inside a world that no longer exists, hoping that it was all true, and fearing that it was not. He is a master plotter, but still manages to keep his voice inside the characters and never strays outside the story lines. I loved it. Too many novelists follow a tired track of conflit, crisis, and resolution, because that time-honored paradigm often works for readers. But Knop, and his Marine protagonist know that there is only one plot in this kind of fiction ("Stranger Comes To Town"). And together they give us a story that ignores traditional paradigms and narrows down the narrative to the only thing that makes fiction interesting--TROUBLE. Peter Romero loves trouble. You'll love him.

Reviewed by: Gary L. Stuart
www.uapress.arizona.edu

EXCERPT

“You ain’t the only policeman ever killed a cop,” Sal Montoya said from the bedroom at the back of the singlewide.
The remains of the night blew down from the Mogollon Rim, crossed the Verde River Valley, scraped dust from the White Hills, and banked skyward off the Black Hills. New Mexico-born Cochiti tribe policeman Peter Romero slouched in his cousin Sal’s kitchenette and stared south at the Bradshaw Mountains shadowed by the low sun. The wind buffeted the trailer, reminding him he’d slept all night in Sal’s driveway in the bed of a pickup. He welcomed the morning heat through the window, and cursed the painful bump on his chin, his life, and everything about Camp Verde, Arizona. Sal’s coffee tasted like plastic, but it warmed him after a shivering night.
“You know another one?”