Diana Ladd - 03 - Day of the Dead

✍ Scribed by J.A. Jance

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2010;2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 241 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0061945374

✦ Synopsis

From Publishers Weekly

Jance's third suspense thriller to feature ex-sheriff Brandon Walker and his family (after Hour of the Hunter and Kiss of the Bees) deftly mixes Native American mythology with a harrowing plot. An old Tohono O'odham woman, Emma Orozco, asks Walker for help in solving the brutal murder of her daughter, Roseanne, who was slain in 1970. Walker is able to take on the challenge because of his membership in TLC, The Last Chance, a privately funded agency that looks into old, unsolved crimes. This ingenious arrangement allows for great flexibility in the action of the story. As Walker searches for clues in Roseanne's death, he comes across similar murderseach with no leads, each involving a dismembered body left alongside a road in the Southwest. The reader learns more and more about the killers, the sexually voracious, utterly amoral Gayle Stryker and her husband, Larry, a truly effective pair of monsters. Meanwhile, Walker's dear friend Fat Crack Ortiz, a Tohono O'odham man, is dying of complications from diabetes. Most of Walker's friends, in fact, are Indians, as is his adopted daughter, Lani. He draws not so much knowledge as strength and perspective from themno mumbo-jumbo here, only believable sensitivity.
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From

Resting both her regular series sleuths, Joanna Brady and J. P. Beaumont, this latest Jance mystery returns to Arizona's Tohono O'Odham reservation, also the setting for two earlier nonseries novels, Hour of the Hunter (1991) and Kiss of the Bees (2000). Retired cop Brandon Walker sets out to investigate a cold case, the mutilation murder of a 15-year-old Tohono O'Odham girl. Suspense builds gradually in the multilayered novel, which is filtered through multiple perspectives, each person adding a piece to a textured puzzle that tracks a pair of serial killers whose crimes extend backward across three decades. As in Jance's two series, the action is intermixed with well-placed social commentary, this time regarding the unconscionable ill use of reservation peoples by vicious mil-ghan (whites), even in the recent past. Although the Indian cultural backdrop is not as integral to the story as it is in Hillerman's novels, this will still appeal to Hillerman devotees as well as to thriller fans accustomed to a sheen of blood spatter and sex with their suspense. Stephanie Zvirin
Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserved