Note: Stop by tomorrow if you want to see my numbers on hours of writing time accomplished and word count added to my novel during the weekend retreat. I’ll also post a few photos to give you an idea where we were, where I worked, and how it all looked before and after the snowfall.

Colorado Author — Robert Greer

Today’s author has written seven novels in the CJ Floyd mystery series, a couple of medical thrillers, and his latest release, a standalone contemporary western novel called Spoon.

Robert Greer is a professor of several medical specialties, has a masters degree in creative writing, writes textbooks as well as fiction, and he raises cattle. You can’t get much more versatile than that.

Released in October 2009, “Spoon tells the story of Arcus Witherspoon, a mysterious half-black, half-Indian, oddly clairvoyant man searching the West for his roots. Hitchhiking near Hardin, Montana, Spoon falls in with a ranching family struggling to keep their ranch afloat amidst the pressures of hard economic times and an encroaching coal company.”

The first book in the CJ Floyd series is The Devil’s Hatband and the most recent is Blackbird, Farewell. At the beginning of the series, Greer’s main character is “a Cheroot smoking African-American bail bondsman . . . a man who plays the odds whether chasing down bond skippers, keeping a thumb on Denver’s gang-banging vermin, or working on the occasional bounty hunting case that comes his way. Dressed in a Stetson, cowboy boots and a black leather gambler’s vest, CJ, a Vietnam veteran, helps keep his ‘home front’ community of Five Points together and its denizens on the straight and narrow.”

I understand Floyd changes careers later in the series, but I haven’t read that far yet. I read and enjoyed the third book in the series, The Devil’s Backbone, partly because it had been recommended by a friend and partly because I had hiked a trail near the Devil’s Backbone located just west of Loveland, Colorado. I’m now looking forward to reading the rest of this series.

Synopsis quotes are from Greer’s website. More information on all of Greer’s books can be found at his website.