Western Mysteries
The trans-Mississippi West seems a great stage for mysteries. The urban East has its turf, especially New York City (and Spenser’s Boston, I hasten to add), and the West Coast has its mean streets, especially in Los Angeles. Florida and New Orleans can make good claims. But the big West, where scale is almost unimaginable compared to the size of a bullet, is an interesting and evocative place for the unknown and the human agent to make it known.
If you wanted to track a lineage for Western Mysteries, you could go back to Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods (1837) or Mark Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson (1894) or others soon to follow by Zane Grey and the explosion of “westerns” in the early 20th Century. For this page, however, in its launch, we will stick the most popular writers for Whistlestop in this category. Check back for more thought and more additions.
Spider Woman's Daughter
Spider Woman's Daughter
It happened in an instant. After a breakfast with colleagues, Navajo Nation Police Officer Bernadette Manuelito sees a sedan careen into the parking lot and hears a crack of gunfire. When the dust clears, someone very close to her is lying on the asphalt in a pool of blood. With the victim in the hospital fighting for his life, every person in the squad and the local FBI office is hell-bent on catching the gunman. Bernie too wants in on the investigation, especially when her husband, Sergeant Jim Chee, is put in charge of finding the shooter.
Bernie and Chee discover that a cold case involving Chee's former boss and partner, retired lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, may hold the key to the shooting. Digging into the old investigation with fresh eyes and new urgency, husband and wife find themselves inching closer to the truth with every clue . . . and closer to a killer who will do anything to prevent justice from taking its course.