Chance and Circumstance: A Chance Colt Literary Mystery

Chance and Circumstance is a fictional police procedural novel about the modern-day American West. The setting takes place in Santa Cruz County, Arizona, the smallest of fifteen counties in the great state of Arizona. Santa Cruz County sits smack dab in the middle of the barren Sonoran desert, surrounded by miles and miles of desolate desert sand, mountains, rock and sky and shares its southern border with the ever-dangerous and always unstable country of Mexico. It is a sparsely populated area known as “The Borderlands Region” filled with twice as many ghost towns as it has real, inhabitable towns.

The novel tells the story of the day-to-day lives and activities of a modern-day lawman named Sheriff Chance Colt and his crime-fighting partners, both two-legged and four-legged, who, along with a seemingly never-ending cast of wacky and weird American West characters, both “good guys” and “bad guys,” inhabit this modern-day “No Man’s Land.”

In many respects the New West is just like the Old West; it is still as wild and wooly as it ever was. However, Sheriff Chance Colt is an old-fashioned nineteenth century lawman at heart, who with his cop colleagues continually strives to fight for truth, justice and the American way. He and his comrades-in-arms attempt to calmly and consistently uphold “The Code of the Old West” in this 21st century American West environment that is still as wild as it ever was and is on a constant collision course, always precariously close to spinning helplessly and haplessly out of control.

Sheriff Chance Colt has a saying that keeps him going despite the dangers he finds in the desolate Arizona wilderness: “A man only needs four things in life to be truly happy: a good woman, a good dog, a good gun, and a good truck. And three out of four ain’t bad.”

So saddle up and ride along as Sheriff Chance Colt and his Deputies, family and friends are consistently kept on alert and on their toes attempting to keep the peace and solve the never-ending stream of mysteries, murders, suicides, rapes, sexual assaults, burglaries, batteries, robberies, assaults, stick-ups and general overall mayhem that constantly ensues, due to the off-beat county citizens who live here, the Mexican drug cartel warlords, the drug mules, the illegal border-crossers, the outlaw biker gangs and just about every other form of evil that eventually comes to visit this dark, desolate borderland region.

Follow Sheriff Chance Colt and his posse as they use their wit, wisdom, common-sense, dog-sense, horse-sense, Native American Indian philosophy, centuries-old Zen Buddhist philosophy, sense of humor, charm and a bit of old-fashioned, smart-assed sarcasm and street justice to battle the bad guys and fight the good fight in this modern-day American Western setting.

What doesn’t kill Sheriff Chance Colt today will only make him madder, badder and stronger tomorrow.