RHINO RANCH By Larry McMurtry

...Instead, Mr. McMurtry gives us a herd of rhinoceroses, huge African black rhinoceroses to be exact. Hence the title. Not surprisingly, the roughly 2,000 folks who live in Thalia (it's a short drive south of the very real Wichita Falls) don't like the animals and don't like the wealthy do-gooder who brings them in to prevent them from becoming extinct. In the end, they don't like Duane Moore very much, either. Small towns are like that. Mr. McMurtry's Thalia novels are just a slice of his lifelong fascination with the American West in general and his own roots in a family where his father and eight of his uncles were all cowboys and ranchers. Thalia is in a part of Texas where the cattlemen find both the grazing and profits increasingly scarce. Yet for a little town that progress passed by, Thalia continues to feel the tremors of the changing outside world. Its people keep on adjusting even as they try to hang on to whatever it was they valued about themselves or their way of life. In "Rhino Ranch," Duane Moore finds himself depressed and adrift. He has retired from a life as an oilman and turned over the drilling business to his son. He now lives in Arizona (which he hates) with a second wife, an expert geologist and meth addict whom he loves but who leaves him, first for Vancouver, then for Tajikistan and then for good, in the first 10 pages. Duane moves back to Thalia, first to the big house and vegetable garden where he and his late first wife lived and raised their kids. Soon enough he also spends more time at the primitive little cabin he has kept out on the banks of the Little Wichita River. Across the river is the Rhino Ranch, where K.K.Rawlings, a leggy Dallas billionairess and basic tough old Texas gal, has decided she will begin breeding the black rhinos that were being hunted into extinction in Africa by crazed European adventurers and hunters who cater to the Asian myth that a powder made from the beast's horn restores sexual potency. Roaming rhinos are just one of the annoyances the people of Thalia find unsettling about K.K. and her entourage...WashingtonTimes