James Crumley: The Mexican Tree Duck (USA 2001)

From the Publisher:
For the crime of executing a jukebox on a lonesome Montana railbed, C. W. Sughrue finds himself sentenced to face the hardest hard cases in the new American West‹and the strangest bird he's ever known...

THE MEXICAN TREE DUCK

With blood on his shoes and the highway, Sughrue takes off on a cross-Western odyssey of sex and gunplay to locate a missing woman who has eluded the FBI, her well-connected Republican husband, and a group of South American cocaine dealers. Joining him are a beautiful undercover deputy, a ragged band of Vietnam buddies, and a young mother and child. Caught in a war he doesn't understand, courting a prize more valuable than he can imagine, Sughrue will find bucketloads of vice and malefaction‹and penitence for more than one man's sins.

Raw, biting, and utterly relentless, this is the award-winning classic tale from a legendary American crime writer.

James Crumley: The Mexican Tree Duck. Mysterious Press, ISBN: 0446677914 (October, 2001), 247 p., $11.95.

James Crumley: The Mexican Tree Duck (USA 1993)

From the Publisher:
It seems that no one can find Sarita Cisneros Pines - not her well-connected Republican husband, not the FBI, not even a group of violence-prone guys with vaguely South American accents. And when Sughrue starts searching, working his way from Montana to Aspen, to the Mexican border, he comes up empty too. Empty but for a woman and infant who become Sughrue's responsibility and obsession... the small, strange, hollowed-out sculpture of a duck that means more than he can imagine - and the blood that keeps getting spilled on his shoes. Sughrue, along with a ragged band of Vietnam buddies, a tough-talking female undercover deputy, and an assorted cast of wanderers, lawbreakers, and lost souls, is in the middle of a war he can't understand. And unlike his last war, C.W. will fight this one to the end, trying to separate traitors from friends and the enemy from the innocent.

James Crumley: The Mexican Tree Duck. Mysterious Press, ISBN: 0892963913 (October, 1993), 247 p., $19.95.