Circles in the Snow: A Bo Tully Mystery (Bo Tully Mysteries)
It’s a lot for a guy thinking about retirement to deal with all at once: someone’s been killing bald eagles; a widely disliked rancher has been murdered (with an arrow, no less); and mysterious circles, perfectly round, are appearing in the snow. Blight County, Idaho, Sheriff Bo Tully juggles a handful of likely murder suspects with his usual wit and aplomb, while handling his cantankerous, ex-sheriff father with rather less finesse. McManus, who’s a humor columnist and nonfiction writer when he’s not writing the Tully novels, has a real gift for dialogue and character; the humor in this delightful series comes out of the characters and the situations, not from clever wordplay or comedy set pieces. And it’s worth mentioning, for those readers who haven’t yet read a Tully novel (this is the sixth), that the mysteries are well crafted and genuinely suspenseful, not merely an excuse for some lighthearted goings-on, but solid puzzlers in their own right. Warning to McManus: you’d better not let Bo retire anytime soon. --David Pitt