Love Follow Murder: In the Land of Enchantment

Sixty years ago, I saw the victim of a gruesome murder wheeled into Embudo Hospital in New Mexico. The hospital no longer exists, but my impressions of a terrible crime are still vivid.

Love Follows Murder is a fictional account of a 1962 murder. This is also a story of a loving family, set in and around Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, a place steeped in a thousand years of history that makes it a National Historic Landmark and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

This historical place is the setting for a dramatic cross-country chase on horseback heading two hundred miles west to Chaco Canyon, a center of ancestral Pueblo culture before its abandonment in AD 1250 owing to climate change.

During the pursuit, love slowly develops between the white Sheriff, Luke, and his Indian deputy, Ava, whom he hires only hesitantly while they hunt for the killer. The story’s suspense comes from whether evil can be brought to justice and whether unpromising circumstances can lead to love.

Mary Austin, 1868–1934, wrote, “There can be no adequate discussion of a country, any more than there can be of a woman, which leaves out this inexplicable effect produced by it on the people who live there.” I know what she was saying, for it was in New Mexico on a moonlit night that I saw a vision of the ocean. It changed my life entirely. At nineteen, I no longer worried about making a living and allowed myself to become an artist.