The Great Taos Bank Robbery

The two inept bandits who staged the Great Taos Bank Robbery got away, though empty-handed — and ended up panhandling downtown, somehow overlooked by the police hunting them everywhere else. They thus entered the annals of local lore — along with the Great Flood of 1935, a three-day drizzle that caused an epidemic of leaky adobe roofs in the usually arid Taos. These stranger-than-fiction true stories are from master storyteller Tony Hillerman’s own collection of favorite anecdotes. Reading the stories himself, he captures the quirky character of Taos and other areas of New Mexico as only a loving resident — and great writer — could, skillfully using regional tales to comment wryly on the most universal of human foibles.