Helpful Score: 1
Mystery Indian style! Excellent..
James Doss is an incredibly great mystery writer. I am so sorry that he died. He was so meticulous about his writing that, when he knew he was terminally ill, he completed a final "wrap-up" book in the series.
The 9th in the Charlie Moon series. I could tell I was missing some background not having read the previous. Charlie Moon is an investigator (7 feet tall, Doss mentions this a lot) for the Ute tribe in Colorado, when he's not tending his ranch. Charlie is around for several seemingly unrelated events: a woman reports her abusive husband missing, a Navajo man tries to run from a DUI traffic stop, a tiny museum gets burgled. An antique dealer tries to broker the return of the museum's items and gets shot right in front of Charlie. Charlie is not exactly a paragon of virtue: his moral code runs more towards avaricious than justice. I found the tone of this book curious. Pretty sure I'm supposed to be laughing as half the time everyone talks like they've stepped out of Jane Austen, but I felt like it was just trying too hard to be clever. You can see the original villain right up front, but all the others are a tangle, and Charlie's intuitions are not told to us. I did like Daisy Perika, the shaman who is Charlie's aunt. Oh well, not looking for another one of these.
