The Devil's Backbone - C. J. Floyd, Bk 3 Author:Robert Greer C.J. Floyd, Denver bail bondsman and sometime bounty hunter, has double trouble in his third adventure (after The Devil's Red Nickel, 1997.) Two friends ask C.J. to find the killer of their pal Hambone Dolbey, a retired black rodeo star who claimed to have discovered diamonds on his rocky patch of land north of Denver. Oil executives Whitaker Ro... more »dgers and Evelyn Coleman had been dickering over the property rights with Dolbey in the months before his death. Dolbey may have had other enemies, including white riders jealous of his rodeo success, and his recently acknowledged son from a long-ago affair with a teenage girl. Meantime, CJ has hauled in bail jumper Bobby Two Shirts, whose homicidally devoted sister, Celeste Deepstream, decides to make CJ pay dearly for his trouble. As a black man investigating the troubled intersection of black and white societies, C.J. faces special problems.
She's a killer C.J. doesn't see coming. Because as soon as he gets back to Denver he's caught up in the mystery of the murder of a black rodeo star at the Greeley Stampede. Now C.J. is following a trail paved with the best intentions to a place called the Devil's Backbone. And with a murderous beauty and a killer both waiting for him, it's going to take an angel to lead C.J. back out alive..« less