The first two novels in Michael McGarrity's "Kevin Kerney" series are a good start by a novice writer. Kerney is a retired police detective with a bad leg and parts of his digestive tract missing due to having been shot in the line of duty. He has fallen on hard times, and his dream in life is to save enough money to buy a ranch. The stories are set in rural New Mexico and involve poaching and smuggling stolen artifacts and disputes over land and water rights as well as the more conventional criminal motives.

"Tularosa" introduces Kerney, who investigates the disappearance of his godson who had joined the military and worked on the White Sands missile range. Kerney's family had owned land near the range and Kerney, as a teenager, trespassed on the range. With this scenario, Kerney deals with the military police, crawls through border dives and rides horseback in the mountains of New Mexico to solve the crime.

"Mexican Hat" has Kerney investigating the death of an elderly man who left New Mexico decades earlier for Mexico who is shot while visiting the land that his family once owned. Kerney joins the investigation under the authority of conservation agencies and the federal BLM.

McGarrity brings his experience as law enforcement officer to these stories, and he addresses details that many other mystery writers gloss over or handle badly - the question of authority of a private individual to investigate major crimes. He solves it by having Kerney deputized by interested agencies. He also brings an obvious love of New Mexico's history and geography into his books.

His writing in these first two books is rough. His dialogue seems stilted in places. He has several stereotyped cardboard characters - for instance a Mexican crime lord in the first novel, BLM bureauocrats in the second. Some of his scenes are somewhat forced and artificial. The level of violence in the first novel is unlikely and unecessary (my opinion is that mysteries need character and plot more than violent action). Kerney's romantic involvements in the early novels are unlikely.

But Kerney is a strong character - a wounded cowboy detective with a strong ethic. He reminds me of a Louis L'Amour hero transposed into the late 20th century west.