In an unusual side trip after 25 years covering art for the New York Times, San Antonio-born Randy Kennedy (Subwayland) delivers a first-rate debut novel set in the llanos of West Texas. At its heart, Presidio is a road trip story. Two long-estranged brothers set out to retrieve an inheritance from their father stolen by the con artist Bettie, who bedded one brother and married the other. Troy, the elder, is a professional lone wolf thief, serially stealing cars and clothing from random motel occupants while rambling across the plains. Harlan remains rooted in their hometown, living in a tweaker shack beneath an abandoned radio tower.
When they boost a car to go after Bettie in the border town of Presidio, they find the plucky 10-year-old Mennonite Martha hiding in the backseat. After settlement elders "shunned" him, Martha's father escaped with her to the Mexican Mennonite colony of Cuauhtémoc City. Ostracized there also, he's now in a Juárez jail for kidnapping, and Martha is determined to reunite with him when he's released into El Paso.
With this rabble of characters, country twang humor and apt descriptions of the pumpjack, cocklebur and turpentine weed landscape, Presidio is a tale of the hard luck life in a place "so far out in the sticks there aren't any sticks." Kennedy paints as powerful a picture as those of the artists he once covered. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.