In “The Last Ranch,” the Kerneys are affected, and McGarrity’s inclusion of the struggle does ample justice to a historical wrong. More than any other author who melds fiction with historical events, McGarrity adeptly portrays the United States government’s grab of the land that became White Sands Proving Ground (now Missile Range). And with Matt’s pronouncement, bloody, red-faced Kevin Kerney, perhaps the last child to be born on the old Tularosa, entered the world, took his first breath, and began to cry.” “(Matt) cut the umbilical cord with his pocketknife and slapped the baby on the rump. “It’s a boy,” McGarrity writes of the moment.

The town’s featured prominently in his stories and he has, he says, sold more books here than any other author. he’ll meet his readers and autograph books. His newest novel, “The Last Ranch,” is already on the shelves at Hastings. This Sunday, May 29, McGarrity is back in Alamogordo. McGarrity himself was a decorated law enforcement officer, an instructor at the state’s Law Enforcement Academy, a Public Defender’s Office caseworker, and a trained psychotherapist who re-established the New Mexico Correction’s Department’s mental health services.

McGarrity’s first novels featured investigator Kevin Kerney, an ex-chief of detectives in Santa Fe. His books have been printed in such countries as Japan, France, Germany, Croatia, England and Norway. Twenty years later, readers around the world now eagerly await each new McGarrity novel. ALAMOGORDO – In 1996, with his first book “Tularosa” in hand, Michael McGarrity drove into Alamogordo from Santa Fe and went knocking on doors seeking media interviews.

Tularosa by Michael McGarrity