Rone Tempest is an award-winning journalist whose career spans four decades, including 26 years as a national and foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times.

The Price of Copper

Labor, Race and Suicide in a New Mexico

“Beautifully written and compelling, this book tells a remarkable history of America’s Southwest, New Mexico, its people, and its sometimes violent social and class conflicts. I am a native of Grant County, and this is the complex story of the place I love and know best, and it is personal for me. Rone Tempest combines the important history of copper mining and its central role in making the US an industrial powerhouse with the story of the painful fight for civil and labor rights where that mining actually took place. This engaging account reveals the extraordinary tenacity of our parents’ generation of New Mexicans, Hispanic working-class families, and reminds us that the contemporary advances in American civil rights we enjoy came as the result of struggle.”

— Howie Morales, two-term Lieutenant Governor of New Mexico

“Tempest’s page-turning account serves as a companion to Santa Rita del Cobre, revealing a man of conscience trapped between an autocratic, anti-labor corporation and Big Labor and offering new insights into the history of copper mining in the American West.”

— Christopher J. Huggard, author of Santa Rita del Cobre

The Last Western

The Unjustified Killing of Michael Rosa by Ed Cantrell

“The story has everything: a faux tough guy who is also a ‘shoot, shovel, and shut-up’ range detective, corrupt cops, a brash and exotic interloper, boomtown craziness, a flamboyant defense attorney, a laconic governor, and frontier justice of the worst kind — all within a contemporary western setting.”

— C.J. Box, #1 New York Times bestselling author of LONG RANGE.

“That the murder takes place outside an establishment called the Silver Dollar Bar is only the beginning of this hugely entertaining piece. Think: ‘High Noon’ meets ‘Training Day’ in ‘Deadwood.’”

— Mike Sager, Esquire, author of The Devil and John Holmes and Hunting Marlon Brando

“Rone Tempest has brought to light extensive new details about the characters involved in one of the American West’s strangest dramas.”

— Pete Williams, NBC News Justice Correspondent

“Rone Tempest’s spellbinding latest work won’t be the last western, but it will stand as one of the very best.”

— Will Bagley, Writer/Historian

“Reading Tempest is like taking a masterclass in writing and reporting - and a seriously good time.”

— Stephanie Gorton, author "Citizen Reporters: S.S. McClure, Ida Tarbell and the Magazine That Rewrote America."

“Tempest gives his readers a gripping, well-told tale, introducing us to a colourful cast of characters inhabiting the volatile, often violent world of a twentieth-century Western boomtown. … a meticulously researched account of the ways in which the unlikely partnership between Cantrell and Rosa evolved… A fascinating and highly enjoyable true crime story.”

— Lee Horsley, Crime Culture