“Leaving Montana” is a wonderful collection, especially his poems of the homestead and family (“Postcard to my father” and “He’s bought it now”). Larum has “a unique talent for crafting images that flow and adding musicality to a poem.

“For example, the “i” sound in trill and kissing and fishing and luminous in “the trill of invisible loons kissing a lake fishing with hollow, luminous voices.” Wonderful, and wonderfully restrained — truly, as if he had just finished and was applying Hugo’s “Triggering Town.”

‘And, beyond that, the pure beauty of the way he turns a phrase:

— in “a rosary of apology mingles with the wisps of blood-scented heat”

— or “Our mother is grumbling fear, her icy stranglehold on our lives the gnawing hunger deep inside”

— or “The stars have gone home, undressed”

— or “The morning dawns brick-red”

— or “Finnish wives set out loaves to cool in the rich air while immigrant husbands churned the earth a fetal green”

— or “dark lucid hours wedged between the sleek and sliver of a moon” (from “Dragon nights,” a totally beautiful poem).

A fine, fine book.”

“Exciting, intriguing, and entertaining!!! I couldn’t put it down!!!”

As characters in Glen Larum’s Waltz Against the Sky drift toward a small town in Texas, their stories are braided into a lariat that cinches their fates together. Like a Tony Hillerman New Mexico novel, Waltz puts the sere, flat landscape back into moral order by following a bloody crime, a violent chase, and a courtroom drama that entangle the lives of ordinary people. Evan Blaine, a young newspaper editor, must search beyond appearances for the truth—and how he can anchor his life’s work, and his heart, within the community. Waltz is a masterpiece, Larum, a master.

I enjoyed Waltz Against the Sky thoroughly and read it carefully for the way you sequenced the plot as you introduced characters and for your lovely writing. Caught myself several times mouthing yes at a description, phrase or dialogue. If I were teaching the book, I would ask my students to make a graph with the characters along the left side and the plot development across the top. You have to pay attention to details that locate the characters along the timeline. I noticed in reviews that some readers said it was a challenge at first but they eventually were drawn in by the reflection your plotting requires. Many famous books have done the same thing so I was up for it and enjoyed the process.

The themes of the book are interesting too. On p. 73, Angione remembers something a grocer had said to him during his hitchhiking: “Something will happen out there if you aren’t careful, something for no reason for all.” That is my philosophy of life too, but as it plays out, even being careful won’t always help you. Randomness is everywhere as Sheriff Fulton finds out when his plan to get his wife away to safety backfires in her tragic death. Ham Michaels’ good intentions don’t always lead to good outcomes. But randomness can lead to good as well. Blaine follows Albers to West Texas and finds Sheila.

However, my heart is with Huck Finn on his raft in the Mississippi with Jim when he has to make a decision about revealing Jim is a runaway slave. Bad luck, the abuse of power, the road taken and not taken can explain a lot of things, but quite often you have to decide who you are and what you are. Blaine makes that choice when he recognizes Dink in the newspaper and decides to let law enforcement know where he is. Consequences follow, good and bad. An interesting image comes to mind: spin the bottle. In kids’ play, all that is at stake is a kiss. In the world you have described so well, anything can happen when the bottle stops.

I enjoyed your place and character names especially when I would know the embedded reference or provenance of the name. Like the character Shotwell = Shotwell stadium in Abilene. Plus it’s grim irony about the performance of law enforcement and the violence. Congratulations for crafting a great read!

Whether I was totally absorbed in the unfolding of events, enjoying the scenery described, or being reminded of my own journalism classes at Rutgers, Waltz Against the Sky was truly an enjoyable read. The novel’s flashbacks were handled so skillfully and transitioned so smoothly that they effortlessly knit together a complex storyline, and the wrap-up came as a complete and most enjoyable surprise. It was a story masterfully told with dignity by one obviously enjoying the task. I found it refreshing to see the principal character portrayed as your basic all-around nice guy enjoying his profession and, most of all, his life. Thanks for a really great story.

Glen Larum’s “Waltz Against the Sky” might have been his introductory novel, but clearly, it ain’t his first rodeo. This Permian Basin writer has crafted a tale that begins in West Texas and winds up in your brain pan.

Calling on his Montana upbringing and a newspaper career path that took him through Odessa, Fort Stockton and other ports of hometown journalism, the author has found a certain voice that rings true in brisk, authentic dialogue. Larum’s fictitious West Texas setting of Indian Springs could be Alpine or Fort Davis … or Anywhere USA, so long as it’s west of I-35.

So skillful was Larum in creating his lead characters – especially the spineless young Tony Angionne and the evil jailbird Valdez — this reviewer, even weeks after reading “Waltz,” still simmers with righteous indignation. Which is to say the coldly calculating Valdez needs to have his ass kicked, and I’d like to volunteer.

Warning: Once the author introduces the characters, prepare to keep pace. Events both heroic and dubious occur with such rapid succession, the pages fairly melt into the story. Or, is it vice-versa? Either way, do not venture into the last half of this one, unless you are prepared to race home after work each day, skip dinner and dive back into the story, to see what happens next.

The title fails to match the storyline (or maybe it’s over my head) but mark well the name Glen Larum. This guy gots game. As a freshly minted Larum follower, I look forward to his next title – “Spring Coulee,” a fictionalized account of the end of the homestead era in the West, when the rough country and demanding lifestyle chewed up and spit out a generation of Americans. After years in newspaper nonfiction, a new master of fiction is emerging and, better yet, he walks among us.

A reader might think he’s got himself into a picaresque and then Wham-O (like the slingshot young Evan Blaine probably lusted after when he read the ads in Popular Science), some brace of characters lurches onto the stage and we’ve “got ourselves a situation.” Against backdrops that Glen Larum clearly knows down to their aromatic essence, Waltz Against the Sky takes us into that setting where someone is knitting a sleeve of the sweater in the bedroom, someone else is working on the collar in the kitchen, there’s a sleeve half done in the garage and who knows what’s going on out on the patio? It’s a luscious array of variegated characters who are presented not in a condescending paragraph but rather in little bits, inched out onto the work table then carefully moved aside as we ponder another part of the knitting endeavor. Hint: It does end up as a sweater, but you gotta be there. Read it. It’s not a galloper that will keep you up half the night. It’s more something to be savored, reflected upon, and then picked up again. We await Mr. Larum’s next work. (Full disclosure: I am mentioned in the Afterword. His words are too generous but I won’t mention it again provided he agrees to bless us with another book.)