Book excerpt: Book one in a planned three-book series, Angels Landing reads as if Taylor Sheridan (“Yellowstone,” “Wind River”) were channeling Stegner or Wendell Berry in the borderlands of Kingsolver’s Arizona novels. Abandoned as a child, adopted as a youth, and driven to an attempted suicidal jump from the world’s highest sandstone wall at the age of 23, Jasper Freeze finds friendship, healing, and heritage in the American Southwest borderlands. Infused with tri-lingual language elements (Spanish, English, Yaqui), a naturalist’s sensibilities for the earth, and the culturally syncretic spiritual paradigms of the American Southwest, fans of Kingsolver, Urrea, Sherman Alexie, Richard Powers, Craig Johnson, and Hillerman will find this a deeply moving contemporary environmental-road-border-buddy novel and spiritual quest unlike any they’ve ever read.