Blues for the buffalo

by Manuel Ramos

The sun, the sand, a young beauty named Rachel in a white bikini--there's no better way to recover from the aches and pains of your latest case. At least that's what attorney and part-time detective Luis Montez thinks until the woman gives him the manuscript of her novel and vanishes. Montez just wants to rebuild his Denver practice, but an aggressive young P.I. with an emotional attachment to Rachel draws him in. With the woman's powerful adopted family on one side and unexplained death of a writer friend on the other, Montez digs up a series of long-told lies and long-hidden ugly truths. He also finds himself confronting one of the great unsolved mysteries of recent Chicano history. What happened to Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, the iconic activist-writer presumed dead since 1974? More to the point, what made Rachel insist the legendary Brown Buffalo was alive--and that he was her real father?