CB McKenzie Books in Order

If you want the award-winning Southwest noir: Bad Country
If you want a strange, dark small-town mystery: Burn What Will Burn
If you want the simplest way in: Bad Country → Burn What Will Burn

CB McKenzie is a novelist of rough country and rougher people. His books tend to begin in places most stories hurry past, trailer parks, bars, creek beds, desert back roads, and towns that feel half left behind. That attention to overlooked ground is a big part of what makes his fiction stick.

McKenzie is a native Texan, and the Southwest runs deep in his work. In his public author bio, he describes a life that ranged far before publication: he through-hiked the Appalachian Trail and worked as a housepainter, haute couture model, farmhand, and professor in places including New York, Vermont, Miami, Milan, Tokyo, and Tucson. Later he earned both an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona.

He took the scenic route into fiction.

That long path matters because his novels do not read like first attempts. McKenzie has said that Bad Country was actually his tenth completed book. So when it arrived in 2014, the debut label was technically true, but only in the publishing sense. The book won the Tony Hillerman Prize, later took the Spur Award for Best Western Contemporary Novel, and was also nominated for the Edgar and Shamus awards.

Bad Country introduces Rodeo Grace Garnet, a former rodeo hand making a living as a private investigator on the edges of southern Arizona. A dead young man near Rodeo's home pushes the story into murder, betrayal, and old resentments, but the novel is just as interested in heat, distance, and the hard social lines of the borderlands. Readers who like noir with a real sense of dust underfoot usually start here.

His second published novel, Burn What Will Burn, shifts to rural Arkansas and follows Bob Reynolds, a drinker, sometime poet, and uneasy outsider who finds a body in a creek. The setup sounds simple. It is not. The book closes in around Bob with suspicion, desire, odd local history, and the feeling that everyone in town is watching everyone else. McKenzie keeps the prose lean, but the atmosphere hangs around.

The margins are where he likes to work.

In interviews, McKenzie has said he writes about people on the margins, and that description fits both his characters and his settings. His protagonists are rarely polished heroes. They are loners, ex-athletes, private eyes, drifters, and stubborn men who keep moving even when common sense says stop. Just as important, the places themselves carry pressure: El Hoyo in Arizona, the backwoods of Arkansas, the worn edges where poverty, violence, memory, and pride rub together.

There is a restless quality to his career, too. Before publication he wrote across forms and modes, including westerns, thrillers, mysteries, literary fiction, and even a Ph.D. dissertation on speculative rhetorical theory. That may be why his books feel shaped by genre without being trapped by formula. He likes crime fiction, but he does not seem especially interested in neat branding, or in giving readers the same hero and same trick every time.

McKenzie has also written about his love for the Southwest, especially Tucson and South Tucson, and you can feel that attachment in the way he handles landscape, not as scenery, but as weather, pressure, and fate. He now lives in California, though he has said he still keeps his pickups in Tucson and Texas. That sounds about right for a writer whose fiction never fully settles down.