Book Description
Santa Ynez, a Novel
Cole Clay, raised a cowboy on California’s idyllic Central Coast, is on the cusp of a new life. A rich wife and a rewarding job in the “new economy” promise an escape from being “land rich and cash poor.” But when the suspicious death of a young cowboy implicates his family, he is immersed in a hot cauldron of family conflict, bribery and crime, and forced to make a choice that will alter the course of his life. Santa Ynez is a modern western saga but, at a deeper level, it is a meditation on what divides us as a people and whether traditional values can survive the onslaught of modernity.
Book Reviews
Dennis Patrick’s Santa Ynez is a wonderfully told story. Rooted in what the Irish poet W.B.Yeats called “one dear perpetual place,” it finds in the particulars of a contemporary California cattle ranch the universal themes that haunt our age: what progress really means, what’s lost, what’s gained, what endures. Deeply reflective but never ponderous, romantic but never saccharine–the saga of the passionate bond between a land and its people–Santa Ynez presents us with a part of America that we lose at our peril. This is a novel to be read, and savored, and read again. I enjoyed it from first page to last.
—Peter Quinn, author of The Banished Children of Eve and the Fintan Dunn trilogy; winner of the American Book Award.
With his screenwriter’s ear for great dialogue and a true westerner’s love for big country and personalities, Dennis Patrick, in Santa Ynez, makes a rodeo ring scandal the cornerstone of an epic tale of family rivalry, love lost, and love reclaimed. Anyone pondering the political struggles of our times – and experiencing them in their own families — will be moved by this propulsive, wildly entertaining novel.
—John Harvey Taylor, Episcopal Bishop of Los Angeles, and author of the novel Jackson Place.