In this Spur Award Finalist for Best Western Short Novel, young Daniel Killstraight returns to the reservation after spending seven years back east, forced to travel the white man's road by learning their ways at the Carlisle Industrial School in Pennsylvania. After watching a childhood friend, Jimmy Comes Last, hang on the Fort Smith gallows for a grisly double-murder, Daniel is asked by his old friend's mother to prove that her dead son was innocent of the crime.
Yet Daniel has his own problems, trying to learn who he really is after being so far from his people for so long. Reluctantly, he joins the tribal Indian Police, and slowly begins to believe that Jimmy's mother was right, that her son wasn't guilty, and as he digs into the crime -- getting help from a Cherokee policeman and a deputy U.S. marshal -- he starts to uncover something much bigger than murder.
Set during the turmoil of the reservation years when Senator Henry L. Dawes was trying to bring an end to the reservation system, and its corruption, KILLSTRAIGHT is not only a murder mystery, but a story of a young Indian's journey to discover himself while disproving the stereotypical Western portrayals of Comanche Indians as soulless, bloodthirsty savages.
