I Missed this Novel and it's already in PB...

Celine.

The a heroine is a 67 year- old New Yorker of upper- class background with emphysema and a drinking problem, controlled but not gone. She is a private detective. Her "Watson" is her husband, an ex-communist lobsterman named Pete.

She faces down a biker gang in a Red Lodge MT bar with the simple Samurai statement "I'm already dead." Of course her hand is on a Glock 26 in her pocket and at least one of them is dead too but they don't KNOW.

There is enough natural tragedy in the background, like there is in the lives of most seventyish people with heart and imagination I know, that there is nothing cheaply clever about it.

One reviewer compared her (the heroine, not the author) to a "wise Annie Proulx". Not QUITE, but I know what she meant- and both are complimented...

Good New England, New York, and Yellowstone; good guns & their use; and the best writing about high- society Northeasterners, I swear, since James and Edith Wharton. I'm in love...