A vanished park ranger and a macabre discovery take small-town cop Franz Kafka, aka ‘K’ right to the edge of the abyss. The Mesa, eyrie of the ancient Pueblan ancestors casts its shadow over small town Milagro, where old-time ranchers and thrusting incomers converge in a common cause: profiteering from the land. Charged with mediating a seemingly innocuous dispute about a slain miniature horse, K is caught in the deadly clash between Old and New West. As his heroes morph into villains and his villains stay villains, K’s customary position between rock and hard place suddenly becomes much more precarious. Flyover Country is the third book in The Milagro Mystery series (The Quality of Mercy, Milagro Mystery #1, 2017; Lacandon Dreams, Milagro Mystery #2, 2019), featuring Franz Kafka, who– just like his more famous namesake– has a keen eye for the absurdities he is confronted with in his rural cop job, though perhaps is lacking the required skill set, dedication and application one would wish for in a police officer. To learn more about K and his (mis-) adventures, please visit www.katayounmedhat.com

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A missing teenager and a failed suicide lead Southwestern K to a cabal of environmental destruction, corrupted ideals and a merciless vendetta. 

Milagro, boom and bust town, between mesas and desert badlands, is ruled by good ol’ boys high on guns and shale. K is caught in a dystopian nightmare where Big Energy is fêted for fracking the life out of the county, a teenage girl’s mysterious vanishing is callously ignored, all the Sheriff’s men are out training schoolteachers to shoot and the mighty melting pot is a witches’ cauldron of intercultural discontent. Navajo cop and soul-brother Robbie Begay’s anarchic investigation methods and virtual track-reading skills lead where K’s principles won’t let him go, while an old Lacandon woman’s dreams play havoc with K's certainties and open doors to another world. 

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Franz Kafka, aka K, is pretty much settled in his humdrum small town cop routine: applying sobriety tests to drivers under the influence, reuniting stray pets with their owners and breaking up the occasional domestic. When the body of a young man is found near Chimney Rock, K and his old buddy Robbie Begay of the Navajo Nation police find themselves drawn into a case that challenges their collective skills set and that is as perplexing as it is disquieting and as mysterious as it is tragic.

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