Bad Country by CB Mckenzie. [View all]

I've just started reading it, only 11 pages in, and I'm not sure I want to continue.

First of all, there's mysterious prologue, and I'm not terribly fond of them, but they're so common anymore there's no point in complaining.

The novel is set in southern Arizona. There's a fictitious county, named Los Jarros. Why would a writer feel the need to make up a fictitious county, rather than setting the it firmly in either Pima or Santa Cruz county? I don't take kindly to made-up stuff like that. And then "Mexican" screen doors keep on being mentioned. I cannot picture what he means. I've lived in Arizona two different times in my life, and I'm now in New Mexico. Haven't really run into that reference before.

A page or two later the main character pulls out a wallet. "There was not much fungible in the wallet." Huh? I think he means there was very little money in it. The meaning of fungible makes no sense in this context.

In a list of yellow pages the character has his phone number listed -- he's a Private Eye -- one city is Los Cruces. No. It's Las Cruces. There is absolutely no excuse for that misspelling.

So now I'm trying to figure out if I should bother to keep reading. All of these little things completely destroy my faith in anything the author says. This is a novel that has been widely praised, and even won the Tony Hillerman Prize. Apparently these sorts of wrong things don't matter much t a prize committee.

Or am I being far too picky, and a fake county, weirdly misused vocabulary, and misspelled city names not at all important?