Robert Richter

Robert Richter is the author of the Something series of mystery novels set in Mexico and featuring Cotton Waters, known to his fishermen buddies along the Nayarit coast as "Algo," (Spanish for "Something"). The Series includes Something In Vallarta 1991), Something Like A Dream (2014), and Something For Nothing. Cotton Waters works his "cultural services" hustle in the streets of Old Town Puerto Vallarta, taking care of dubious business on the seedier sides of the Mexican Riviera for the restless and rich--and sometimes for the needy.

From Nebraska homesteader stock, Robert Richter grew up in Colorado and was a member of the first MA creative writing program at Colorado State University in 1973. In 1975, he returned to the family farm and was a fourth generation dryland wheat farmer for twenty years. After giving up his own farming, Richter did itinerant farm labor, substitute teaching, court interpreting, and conducted escorted excursions in Latin America while continuing to write cultural essays, history, and fiction. Richter won the Nebraska Arts Council’s Literary Achievement Award in 2000, and in 2007, he was a Fulbright Research Fellow in Buenos Aires, studying and writing about Argentina’s frontier history. He continues to live in southwestern Nebraska, but he has a relationship with west coast Mexico that goes back fifty years. Experience in both those cultural geographies continues to infuse his work.