The Taos Pueblo reservation in New Mexico provides the setting for Redemption, Deborah J. Ledford’s gripping, fifth, crime fiction novel. Sheriff’s deputy Eva “Lightning Dance” Duran is a member of the Taos Pueblo nation. Like many, Duran lives and works off the reservation where work is hard to find and doesn’t pay enough.
My protagonist in the Cash Blackbear crime series is a nineteen-year-old Ojibwe woman who has aged out of foster care in the early 1970s. She drinks beer, smokes cigarettes, and works as a farm laborer in the Red River Valley of the North. Short and lithe with waist length dark hair, she shoots a mean game of pool at barroom billiard tables. And she helps the local county sheriff solve crimes.
I have always enjoyed Marilyn Meredith's Deputy Tempe Crabtree series, so I was happy to hear that there was a new one out.
In River Spirits, the latest book in this delightful series, a movie is being filmed on the Bear Creek Indian Reservation and the crew is creating havoc on the reservation by trespassing on sacred ground and not following the rules established to allow them to film there.
I am a great fan of the work of Tony Hillerman. I reread his books but I have been looking for other writers in the same sort of genre: Western America and Native American mysteries. I have found two brand new writers who have first novels out that fit in the general category.
