The powerful sequel to Double Wide , the blockbuster Western Writers of America double Spur award winner for Best First Novel and Best Contemporary Western… and True West Magazine's Best Western Crime Novel of the Year A wealthy Tucson couple is murdered in a home invasion burglary-gone-horribly wrong. They were close friends of Prospero "Whip" Stark, a one-time major league phenom pitcher now living with a colorful group of outcasts in his remote, desert trailer park... and honing his detective skills reading classic crime novels. Hell-bent on justice, Whip's search for the killers leads him to the Champagne Cowboys, a gang of thieves covering their tracks with corpses. PRAISE FOR CHAMPAGNE COWBOYS : "The writing flows easily, the dialogue is peppered with wry observations, the plot tightly braids its seemingly disparate strands into a fascinating pattern, and the characters zing with life. This intelligent, pleasurable western noir will have readers longing for more." Publishers Weekly STARRED Review "If your reading choices embrace something a bit different, coexisting with a first-rate mystery, Champagne Cowboys is a definite five-star read." Green Valley News "This book is a western through and through (with) misfit characters so clearly realized you’ll know them immediately. These are characters we run into every day in real life—the people who don’t fit in the preassigned paradigms of our society. The West becomes a character unto itself. Really enjoyable and highly recommended." Sixgun Justice Podcast "This sequel is strong enough to stand on its own merits. Author Banks gives Stark a perceptive insight into his fellow characters, as well as himself, and tosses in enough sarcastic wisecracks to keep the narrative lively and entertaining. Like the debut novel, the lesser traveled back roads of the mountains, valleys, and small towns outside the urban centers of Arizona are not only a backdrop to the plot, but also as essential to the novel’s ambiance as the characters themselves." Bookgasm " Champagne Cowboys stands out from the herd of mysteries and thrillers. I loved the brilliant quirkiness of its central characters, the skillful balance of tension and unexpected humor, and the celebration of Tucson and the saguaro desert. A good read from start to finish. A tip of the Stetson to author Leo Banks." Anne Hillerman, New York Times bestselling author Prospero "Whip" Stark, the ex-baseball pitcher who owns Arizona's Double Wide trailer park, juggles three murder cases, two of them with uncomfortably personal connections.Whip's girlfriend, KPIN-TV reporter Roxanne Santa Cruz, calls him one morning to ask him to check up on Ash Sterling, the mortally ill Afghan war hero and admitted leader of the Champagne Cowboys, a highly successful gang of thieves, whom Roxy's been interviewing in what looks like his final days. And so they are. Accompanied by his buddy Cashmere Miller, Double Wide tenant and convicted felon, Whip finds Sterling shot to death, presumably before he could spill the beans about the Foothills murders, whose victims, attorney Paul Morton and his wife, Donna, were good friends of Whip's. Evidence placed the Cowboys at the murder scene, and although Sterling insists that he and his buddies would never kill anybody, he hinted the night before his death that he knew more about the case than he'd told anyone. Prompted by the discovery that the Cowboys included Sterling's fellow vets Pvt. Titus Ortega and Lance Cpl. Vincent Strong, Whip (Double Wide, 2018) is eager to pursue Sterling's killer and even more eager to discover who shot the Mortons. But there's a third case that will always be first in his heart: the fatal stabbing of Cristy Carlyle, for which Whip's father, Sam Houston Stark, a beloved professor at Arizona State before he got dragged down by heroin, was arrested, tried, and imprisoned. It's bad enough that leads in this cold case are scant; what's even worse is that Wanda Dietz, the Tempe Police Department detective who arrested Sam, shows absolutely no interest in following them up. Whip's adventures bring him up against a broad spectrum of variously untrustworthy and clueless types, from a priest with an eye for the dollar to a "food court twerp" whose hilariously demented dialogue seems copied verbatim from a comic strip.As the heroine aptly says: "It's a Hallmark movie except for all the dead people." -- Kirkus Reviews In high school, Leo W. Banks worked loading delivery trucks with the Sunday edition of the Boston Globe. In those days the Sunday paper was really heavy, so he switched from lifting to writing. He graduated from Boston College and earned a masters degree from the University of Arizona, where he later taught writing. His articles have appeared in the USA Today, Newsday, Miami Herald, National Review, National Geographic Traveler, Sports Illustrated, Wall Street Journal and many others. He has been a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and, yes