Mine Work — Jim Davidson

When Markus Cottin begins digging into some family mysteries his father tells him he will find “only a chain of fools, each one worse than the one that came before.” His search takes him to Colorado mining towns, to the Navajo reservation, and around the desert Four Corners region, and the story he uncovers is a painful one of race politics and labor unrest in the 1950s West. After he finds his own family involved in bombings and the murder of a Navajo miner, he can't stop until the story leads him back, link by link to his grandfather, his father, and ultimately himself.A powerful novel of the Southwest, Mine Work is told with feeling and style by a writer who knows the region, road by dusty road.When first published in 2000, Mine Work won two coveted Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America for best original paperback and best first novel. In multiple printings it became an admired classic of Western writing.