Amazon.com Review
Spirit Sickness marks the return of Bureau of Indian Affairs investigator Emmett Quanah Parker, a Comanche, and FBI special agent Anna Turnipseed, a Modoc, who first pooled their investigative talents in
Cry Dance. Anna is recovering from a vicious attack and dreads returning to the field; Emmett, however, will do whatever he can to lure her back to active duty. When the bodies of tribal patrolman Bert Knoki and his wife are found in a fire-gutted police cruiser in a remote wash on the Navajo reservation, Emmett seizes the opportunity to request Anna's help. As the investigation unfolds, the agents find themselves questioning the dead cop's integrity, delving into a gritty world of poverty and prostitution (just what was Knoki doing visiting a Utah cult in the company of a hooker?), and confronting the eerie legacy of Navajo myth.
That myth centers around the figure of the Gila Monster, said to cure sickness with his trembling paw and to be charged with redeeming the sins of the first Indians by destroying them. Emmett and Anna, who have long sublimated their traditional upbringing to a more rational modernism, must struggle with a madman who has woven his insanity into the myth of the Gila Monster, creating his own reality--and his own very real victims.
The novel is workmanlike, rather than inspired. Although press releases have touted Kirk Mitchell as a threat to Tony Hillerman's supremacy in rendering the lives, secrets, and crimes of the Native American Southwest, Mitchell has yet to approach Hillerman's delicacy of touch and effortless integration of native culture into crime narratives. Mitchell's references to Navajo myth seem ponderous, distant, and irrelevant to the unfolding action. The same complaint might be made of the onerous distraction that is the subplot of romantic attraction between Parker and Turnipseed. If the reader is utterly unable to detect any hint of sexual tension between the two, one wonders why they spend so much energy--and so many pages--fretting about it. --Kelly Flynn
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
In his second suspense novel featuring unseasoned FBI Special Agent Anna Turnipseed and relentless Bureau of Indian Affairs Investigator Emmett Parker (after Cry Dance), Mitchell pulls out all the stops. Emmett persuades Anna, a fellow Native American, to join him on a case in the Navaho Reservation's Four Corners area. The ritualistic murders of a tribal policeman, Bert Knoki, and his wife, Aurelia, lead the investigators on a serpentine path. As they tear around Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, Anna and Emmett fight their mutual attraction, but their bickering can't disguise the compassion they feel for each other. All Mitchell's complex characters are haunted by the past; the detectives arrive at the solution by first examining Southwestern history, then forcing the truth out of suspects and witnesses. One wonders how Anna and Emmett are able to continue their physically wounding and emotionally grueling work on hardly any sleepAbut, after all, this is fiction. Comparison with Tony Hillerman is inevitable, due to the locale and Mitchell's Hillermanesque blending of Native American myth and practices with themes that emphasize the hard life of contemporary Indians. But Mitchell's novels are more violent than Hillerman's, his killers more emotionally tortured, his detectives far more damaged in body and soul. Shifting the location of each book should help Mitchell, a powerful writer of deep emotions, breathtaking natural beauty and nail-biting suspense, to step into his own spotlight. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
