Steve Kearney has just been evicted from his New York apartment after his girlfriend steals the rent money and runs off with somebody else.

As he leaves, he carts out his life's work in trash bags -- thousands of pages of dense novels, plays and poems, not a single word published.

Somehow, Kearney lands a three-month grant as playwright-in-residence at Creedemore Historical Society in Colorado. He is commissioned to write a historical play about this tiny Old West town.

His timing could not be better. He walks into the perfect drama as Ticky Lettgo, an old, curmudgeonly landowner, fires gunshots from his property at the rafts of a river expedition led by Mountain Man Red Fields, setting off a national media maelstrom.

The lands-rights case goes to court, and reporters and assorted other wackos descend on tiny Creedemore. Lines are drawn in the sand -- macho ranchers vs. militant environmentalists, green-haired reporter vs. stone-faced sheriff deputy, angsty Easterners vs. wizened Westerners.

This is a big, sprawling book, which loops like a lasso from hilarity to poignancy and back. And although it starts out a little slowly, it builds to a wonderfully suspenseful crescendo with an eco-terrorist trying to pull off a malicious plot on the day of the play.

McLarty, an actor whose credits have included "Law & Order" and "Sex and the City," writes with heart about both big-town artistic insecurity and small-town foibles.

His main characters are complex, quirky and utterly likable: There is Kearney, the pudgy and insecure artist who always says "cool" and finds his voice away from home; his girlfriend Mollie, a painter who is battling breast cancer; Sheriff Petey Meyers, a transplant from Boston who keeps the peace by invoking the wisdom of his slain partner Reedy; and Roarke, Kearney's best friend, a lesbian theater director who flies in to direct Kearney's show.

McLarty is like the great director of this human circus, and, occasionally, he spins off too many subplots and bit characters.

But he writes with grace about the balancing act between art and life, and this book is a thrilling ride through a still-wild West.