Amber Foxx's Blog

There’s a lot of wildlife we don’t see. The Rio Grande is low right now, making it easy to cross from the empty desert land on the other side. Tracks in the mud from recent rain showed small hooves trotting around on the mesa near Healing Waters Trail where I was running. I’ve never seen a javelina up there, but those were their little pointy feet. No surprise. We expect them around here. A friend sometimes has them in her yard.

But I never expected to encounter a mountain lion. Its tail was to...

Unique, breathtaking, intense—and somehow occasionally funny in the midst of tragedy and horror—Shutter is one of the most original books I’ve read in years. Forensic photographer Rita Todacheene is gifted with not only skill in her work but with a spirit world connection. The gift is a burden, provoking concern and conflict in her family and in her workplace and creating profound stress in her personal life, but the ghosts will not leave her alone.

The structure of the book, alternating between...

Perhaps you remember my post about a man squirting weedkiller on unwanted plants. He explained that if they weren’t eradicated, they would take over. I’m happy to report they have done exactly that—only a few weeks after their apparent demise. Welcome back!

I wish I could say that Jemez Spring was as good as the rest of the series, but it’s not. I had to finish it because it wraps up the Sonny Baca series, but it doesn’t do the story cycle justice. Even Sonny himself is not as strong a character. He becomes something between a caricature and an archetype. I almost stopped reading early on, when Sonny—a private investigator—and a police detective are in the presence of the murder victim who died in a hot spring bath at Jemez Springs, and they deris...

The state park employee walked slowly with a small tank and a squirt nozzle he aimed onto each unwanted bit of vegetation on the playground. I hoped he was only getting rid of silver nightshade. It’s prickly and toxic, though it has pretty flowers. But there wasn’t much of it. There were many tiny, tough yellow flowers.

I asked the man with the tank how he chose which plants got to stay and which plants had to go.

“They all have to go,” he replied.

“All of them? I like the little yellow flowers...

I’ve been so busy writing the next book that I’ve neglected to write any blog posts. So, what have I accomplished?

I finished the first draft of Mae Martin Book 10 and have completed the first stage of revision—reading without making changes yet, taking notes as if I were critiquing for another writer. This is challenging. I see things I want to change right away, but why fix it if I might end up cutting it?

I grasped the importance of a theme I had doubts about I while I was writing, a theme re...

“Are you on Team Joe or Team Ted?” asked the person at the swag table after the Truth or Consequences premier screening of the movie, Eddington on July 10, 2025. I picked a “Ted Garcia for Mayor” button. Given the choice, I’d have voted for him over Sheriff Joe Cross, but I was really on a third team.

If this movie were a mystery, the person solving it would have been the Pueblo cop who wasn’t minding his own business, who was encroaching on the sheriff’s territory because a crime took place on...

Like all Pot Thief mysteries, this one is unconventional, entertaining, and educational, with historical and philosophical explorations as well as a mysterious little pot and a sudden death, perhaps a murder. These ingredients are blended and seasoned with insight and humor. If you’re a series fan, you’ll enjoy a reunion with the usual characters as well as another trip to the village of La Reina. It was good to spend more time in Old Town Albuquerque and in Hubie’s shop. As usual, his personal...

Bob told me this story as he enjoyed a fresh cup of hot black coffee on the patio at the New Mexico State Veterans Home on a ninety-nine-degree day. In the shade. the weather wasn’t bad—dry heat really is quite tolerable—and his coffee stayed hot. Bob loves coffee, and it has to be strong, hot, and black. According to him “there’s no such thing as strong coffee, only weak people.” His favorite beverage led to the story of a welcome cup seventy years ago.

Bob remained in Korea after the armistic...

The great strength of this book is its emphasis on the ordinary people involved in the international incident at Columbus, New Mexico in 1916. The book is not about Pancho Villa. It’s not about General Pershing. It’s about the men who were captured during Villa’s raid on the small town on the border of New Mexico and Old Mexico. One of the Villistas captured was a twelve-year-old boy. Their stories—how they came to be in Villa’s army, whether or not they knew they were in the United States, whe...