Martha Burns is the author of Blind Eye, a Finalist for the 2023 Spur Award for Best Western Contemporary Novel from the Western Writers of America (WWA). Since 1953, WWA has promoted and honored the best in Western Literature with the annual Spur Awards. In announcing the 2023 awards, Spur Award chair, R.G. Yoho said, “To those who falsely say the Western is dead, I contend that the state of our craft is indeed strong, whether it be though Western fiction, nonfiction, poetry, song or screen.”
Martha is currently working on her second novel, Across the Narrows coming in late 2023 from Atmosphere Press.
Blind Eye
At the Bounty Canyon Ranch in Southeastern New Mexico, the bodies of Luke and Deona Pruitt are buried in a manure pit and their 14-year-old son Leeland Pruitt is missing.
Deputy Sheriff Greenwood is called out to investigate the missing Pruitt family and discovers the grim scene. Leeland’s brutal upbringing was an open secret overlooked by neighbors and teachers for years. The community turned a blind eye as Leeland was moved by his cruel father from one remote ranch to another. And so, Deputy Greenwood begins a twenty-four-hour hunt to find and save the boy suspected of murdering his parents.
Blind Eye is both a tragedy and a dilemma of moral conscience. In this tale of cultural complicity, the community, at best, looked the other way and, at worst, enabled abuse, leaving us all to ask, ‘What is too much to ask of a boy?’
Author Martha Burns