Deception on All Accounts

August 1, 2003
A robbery/murder at the Sycamore Springs, OK, branch bank where she works haunts Sadie Walela, whose Cherokee heritage has hindered her career track. She now receives a promotion, but police seem to suspect that she was somehow involved in the robbery. When they arrest a homeless man she had befriended for the crime, she investigates on her own to clear the guy and dissipate the clouds over her. Complications include a pesky ex-con ex-husband, burly and helpful Sergeant McCord, and hunky love interest Jaycee. Evenly paced prose, increasingly suspenseful plotting, and the emergence of a strong heroine characterize this promising first mystery.

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2003
It's a pleasure to make the acquaintance of Sadie Walela, a banker in northeastern Oklahoma who is thrust into the role of amateur sleuth after a spate of branch robberies leaves several colleagues dead and her career in critical condition. Sadie, who was much closer to her Cherokee father, uncle, and grandmother than she was to her white mother, lives on her dad's old spread with a gentle horse and a ferociously protective wolf-dog. No passive victim, Sadie displays admirable toughness as she copes with racist supervisors, rabid FBI agents, and an abusive ex-husband. The story's most satisfying aspect is how Sadie's essential decency keeps leading her toward the solution. Instead of developing a full set of investigative skills on the fly, she gets at the answers by helping a homeless man, befriending children, and leaving herself open to the possibility of love. Although the plot could use more thickening and the bad guy isn't hard to spot, Hoklotubbe paints a believable picture of Indian-white relations in small-town America and crafts a series protagonist as savvy as she is sweet.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)