The Bonito City Tragedy by Rick Geary

I don't think you can get this book, right at this moment. The author's main website and Storenvy pages are down - at least for me, at least here. It doesn't have an ISBN, so it won't be available through the usual book channels. It was a Kickstarter, and that page is still live - but you can't jump on a train that already left the station.

The Bonito City Tragedy is the latest in a long series of books - originally from NBM, and then, over the last decade, self-published - from Rick Geary, in a small format and telling the story of a famous historical crime. Most of those crimes, I think all of them, have been murders. The publisher-backed series were "A Treasury of Victorian Murder" and "A Treasury of XXth Century Murder" (he switched centuries about seven years after the world did, one century delayed), with nine books in the first batch and seven in the second.

Since 2014, he's self-published a number of similar books: shorter, increasingly about local (to him) history, increasingly told as single large panels for each page. I don't know if this is a comprehensive list, but the books I've seen 2014 include The Elwell Enigma, The True Death of Billy the Kid, Murder at the Hollywood Hotel, The Story of the Lincoln County War, Chester & Grace: The Adirondack Murder, and The Wallace Mystery, which all fall into that general style. (Then there was Carrizozo: An Illustrated History, which is even more local history, but much less murder.)

Bonito City Tragedy tells the story of another multiple murder, in the small New Mexico town of the title - it's currently at the bottom of a man-made lake, but that was long afterward - in 1885, when a boarder got into a fight with his roommate and escalated from there. There's no mystery to this one, unlike the older books: this guy just killed a bunch of people, very obviously, and got the immediate consequences.

Geary's art is lovely as always, rippling precise lines of crisp black making the large pictures of outdoor recreation, carefully-depicted 19th century life, and, inevitably, brutal murder..

The earlier books are deeper and longer and have a lot more nuance - telling Lizzie Borden's story gave Geary more material to work with than Billy the Kid's, for example - but I suppose he's hit all of the obvious candidates long ago, and this is the kind of story he wants to do now. If you actually find Bonito City, it's another solid story of olden-day murder, well told by Geary.