Desert Wind

Starred review from December 5, 2011
Webb pulls no punches in exploring another human rights issue in her excellent seventh mystery starring Arizona PI Lena Jones (after 2009’s Desert Lost). Lena follows her Pima Indian partner, Jimmy Sisiwan, to his hometown, Walapai Flats, where his brother, Ted Olmstead, is being held as a material witness in the murder of Ike Donohue, a public relations whiz who represented the soon-to-open Black Basin Uranium Mine. The mine’s owner, Roger Tosches, once operated another mine that years earlier caused many cancer deaths and polluted the Navaho reservation on which it was located. Webb also charts the impact of aboveground testing of atomic bombs in Nevada on Downwinders, those who unknowingly breathed the poisonous air and ate contaminated food. A prickly but perceptive East Coast journalist and a remarkably sophisticated county sheriff help clarify the situation for Lena, who comes to realize she can’t cure all the areas ills. Author tour.

January 1, 2012

When her PI partner, Pima Indian Jimmy Sisiwan, asks Lena Jones (Desert Lost) to stay out of a case involving his family living on the Arizona-Utah border, she naturally ignores him. Jimmy's brother, Ted, has been jailed in connection with the murder of a local resort's media relations guy. Unnervingly, this crime is tenuously connected to the earlier death of Ted's community activist wife. The narrative flips back and forth from the present day to 1954, when John Wayne filmed in nearby Snow Canyon, UT, an area especially vulnerable to fallout from that era's nuclear testing in Nevada. Lena discovers a cancer pandemic and thinks she has stumbled into a powder keg situation. And she's right. VERDICT Webb's compelling expose of the damage done to nuclear fallout victims (known as downwinders), accompanied by research notes and bibliography, makes for fascinating reading, despite a disappointing denouement. Sue Grafton's alphabet series is a prime read-alike for this series; also consider Pari Noskin Taichert and Steven Havill for Tony Hillerman influences. [See Prepub Alert, 11/14/11.]

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2011
You can never be too careful with murderers, however much you like them. When full-blooded Pima Jimmy Sisiwan doesn't show up for work at Desert Investigations, Scottsdale private eye Lena Jones, who considers him her "almost-brother," finds him locked in a jail cell in tiny Walapai Flats after he asked a little too vigorously why his brother Ted was being held as a material witness in the murder of Ike Donohue, a PR flack for local uranium mining interests. Did Ted set out to avenge the murder of his wife Kimama, an active agitator with V.U.M. (Victims of Uranium Mining)? Lena gets Jimmy released, but her snooping puts a target on her back. Then Roger Tosches, the richest man in the county, is killed before he can complete the purchase of a ranch. It's possible that both men were killed by Gabe, the cook at the ranch, who has by now confessed to the Donohue murder. When that proves unlikely, Lena chats up the two widows, one grieving, one not, and follows Olivia, a Times reporter, to a meeting of cancer sufferers who've been dealing with medical calamities ever since the Nevada nuclear tests over 50 years ago. Despite assurances from the Atomic Energy Commission that the tests were harmless, half the cast and crew of the 1954 John Wayne film The Conqueror have passed away, and radioactive soil and water contamination have dispatched some family members going back three generations. One more will die before all the angles become clear to Lena and an apparition resembling the Duke himself tips his hat to her and rides off into the sunset. A perfect example of the mystery-on-a-soapbox, in which the author's moral outrage is more compelling than the fiction designed to convey it. And Lena (Desert Lost, 2009, etc.), with her bad-choice romances and appalling childhood abuse, is hard to like.

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