Rhino Ranch

Book excerpt: ​In his signature his elegiac prose​, Rhino Ranch finds Larry McMurtry bidding a final farewell to his multi-book hero, Duane Moore, and the rapidly changing town of Thalia, Texas. The town of Thalia, Texas has changed forever. By the end of When the Light Goes, Duane was already realizing how different his dusty old oil patch was becoming. Now, coming back from a near-fatal heart attack, it is nearly unrecognizable to him. Returning home to recover, Duane finds a new neighbor, K.K. Slater, a stubborn, tough, quirky billionairess, who also happens to have opened the Rhino Ranch—a preserve to save the black Rhino—on her property. In the midst of a world to which he no longer belongs, in a town in which the land that used to reap oil now serves as a nature preserve, he watches the world change around him and begins to reflect on love affairs past and the missed opportunities he now regrets. Rhino Ranch is a bittersweet and fitting end to this iconic series, a tribute to all of the emotion, hilarity, whimsy, and poignancy that readers have followed across decades.