Review: "The Blue Horse" by Bruce Borgos

The Blue Horse by Bruce Borgos Minotaur Books, 2025   Bruce Borgos’s third Sheriff Porter Beck procedural, The Blue Horse, opens with a pop and a wow—a BLM (Bureau of Land Management) wild horse gather, also known as a roundup, is interrupted when a helicopter crashes while pushing a herd through a narrow canyon in Beck’s Lincoln County, Nevada—but ends with a shrug and a sigh. Beck, who was watching the gather from the back of his own horse, locks down the crash site almost immediately. And in no time at all Beck and his deputy, Tuffy Scruggs, determine it was no accident. The pilot was shot by a sniper and they even find a spent shell casing atop a blue plastic toy horse. The primary suspect is Etta Clay, the leader of a wild horse advocacy group called CANTER. The local Nevada ranchers, and the BLM’s leadership, think CANTER is fanatical since it has compared the removal of wild horses from Nevada’s rangeland to genocide. But Beck isn’t so sure of Etta’s involvement in the killing or that CANTER is wrong about the way the horses are managed on public lands. Then Lincoln County is shocked by another brutal murder and while the two killings are different in style, Beck figures they must be related. The Blue Horse has a complex plot with angles and nuance—the Montreal mafia plays into it, as do ranchers, modern mining, Beck, who suffers from night blindness due to a congenital disease called retinitis pigmentosa, and, since the action takes place in September 2020, so dies Covid. Not to mention, Beck’s sister goes missing in a national park. While the complexity adds drama, it lessens the impact of the action and makes the climactic clash a little ho-hum. The villains are nasty, but (especially in the last third of the narrative) are cartoonish and have all the subtlety and competence of clowns. With that in mind, Beck is solidly drawn and likable, the setting is vivid, and the didactic discussion about wild horses is interesting as heck. If you like Craig Johnson’s Longmire, you’ll enjoy The Blue Horse but all the while wish it had that same richness as Borgos’s previous novels.

Check out The Blue Horse on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the hardcover.