Nightland [Paperback]

Louis Owens (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 1997

Two half-Cherokee friends witness a man fall to his death out of the New Mexico sky, accompanied by a suitcase containing nearly a million dollars, and become the targets of the men who lost the money. Reprint. K. PW. "

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

After Billy Keene sees a dead body and a suitcase fall from the sky in rural New Mexico, he and his hunting buddy Will Striker, both of them half-Cherokee, decide to keep the $850,000 they find in the suitcase?and so begins Owens's solemn and surely told third Native American crime thriller (after Bone Game, 1994). Immediately, the two friends are attacked from above by a helicopter, which they shoot down in a brief battle. They try to hide the money along with any evidence of the shoot-out, but soon the local sheriff informs them of an impending investigation. Their task grows even more difficult when Billy begins a romance with a beautiful, mysterious Native American woman, and when Billy's elderly grandfather?who attempts to call on ancient Native American forces to extricate the friends from their predicament?disappears from the family ranch. After a local drug dealer comes calling to recover the cash, a series of violent confrontations erupts. Owens handles Billy and Will's romantic difficulties with compassion, adding resonance to a well-wrought thriller capped by a twist-filled climax.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Owens (Bone Game, LJ 9/1/94) mines a rich vein of Native American lore and landscape in this buddy thriller about two half-Cherokee ranchers in New Mexico. As dried up as their land, Will and Billy support themselves by rounding up cattle for other ranchers. When they conspire to divide up a dead man's million dollars, they set evil forces in motion that propel them into the dark Cherokee Nightland, ,from which only Will emerges. Most of the flashbacks are skillfully woven into the fabric of the narrative, but when they're not the pace sags. Owens, of Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish descent, delivers multidimensional characters, quirky humor, and a lyrical sensitivity to Cherokee tradition that hovers on myth. A unique combination of literary style, strong story, and American Indian culture makes Nightland an appealing addition to fiction collections.?Molly Gorman, San Marino, Cal.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Signet (August 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0451186834
• ISBN-13: 978-0451186836
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 4.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,625,681 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Storm Out Of The West, August 21, 2002

By 

Bruce Crocker "agnostictrickster" (Whittier, California United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Nightland (Hardcover)

Billy Keene and Will Striker, the main characters of Louis Owens' novel Nightland, are half-breed Cherokees living on failing ranches in New Mexico that their grandparents bought from the Mexican-Americans whose family had a grant from Spain [who took the land from Native Americans in the first place]. They're out hunting deer when a man [who we find out is of Pueblo Indian blood] falls from the sky and ends up skewered on a juniper tree. A suitcase full of money falls with him. Despite misgivings, Billy and Will keep the money. Then all hell breaks loose. Nightland is at heart a thriller, but as with Owens' other novels, it is also a musing on identity. Native American spirituality and the supernatural play a key role in the novel, so if suspension of disbelief is a problem for the potential reader, don't start this book. This is a much faster read than Bone Game and The Sharpest Sight. I found Nightland to be one of the highlights of my summer reading. Oh, and as if my opinion actually counted, I think Richard Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino should buy the rights to Nightland and make a movie. One of the pieces of sad news from this summer was that Louis Owens had taken his own life. He left us five great novels, including Nightland.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This mystery is pure heat lightning, July 20, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Nightland (Paperback)

from the very first paragraph. Owens's brand of wit and humor blend with his examination of the ranching life in the New Mexico desert to create a highly-charged, complex murder mystery. Set in Indian country, Nightland stakes a strong multicultural claim to the art form of the American Murder Mystery, but it stakes a claim also on the magical realism of American Indian and South American literature. The resulting blend of ghosts and grim realism give the story a dark, mystical, enspirited patina. The pig and dog are hilarious counterpoint to the Cherokee mixedblood heroes. Round out the story with amiable ghosts, a seductive shape-shifter, and some nasty bad guys and you have a bona fide page-turner.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Owens' novel is off to a flying start, August 6, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: Nightland (Hardcover)

as his mixed-blood Cherokee protagonists encounter the results of a drug-money drop gone bad; the drug dealer, pushed from his plane, soars like a vulture and is impaled on a New Mexican cedar snag while his $850,000 in cash drops at the feet of the two deer-hunting ranchers.Always one who loves to create the subtle blend of myth and modern, Owens has carefully crafted a retelling of the Cherokee legend of the thunder twins born to Kana'ti and Selu, the first man and woman. Close friends Will Striker and Billy Keene have enough trouble already,with a drought parching their land and their women discontent to live with them. Choosing to regard the cash as a gift from the great spirit, the two inadvertently unleash a torrent of evil activity that all seems to arrive from the west, the Nightland of Cherokee legend. Add an ancient grandfather who is literally fading fast, a genial ghost, an insatiable shape-shifter, and sundry drug dealers with varied agendas and Owens has a mystery that moves along at a clip that will satisfy, among others, the readers of Tony Hillerman's Indian Country mysteries. Humor and irony are the hallmark of all of Owens' novels, as are the thoughtful, non-stereotypical Native American characters he places on the stage. All of his sound and fury signifies something: a shift away from Indians as symbols of the past, of drunken victims of Spanish and Anglo invaders. Cultures meet and merge in this marginal world where the stage is lit by heat lightning and the orchestra pit contains thunder, singing coyotes and exploding bullets.