The Barnes & Noble Review
The New Mexico-based writing team of Aimee and David Thurlo have created something special in their Ella Clah mystery series: hard-edged police procedurals with heart. Ella is a top-notch Navajo cop, an ex-FBI agent who returned to the reservation to investigate her father's murder, then stayed to do her part to preserve Navajo culture by making life safer for her people. In this eighth volume of the series, a tribal police officer is killed on duty, shot by an unknown assailant. It looks like a simple burglary gone wrong -- complicated by equipment failure due to departmental budget cuts -- but some of the pieces don't quite fit. Ella must find the killer and balance the scales of justice with whoever just made an enemy of the whole department. That job gets tougher than expected when the threads of her investigation start connecting to the hotly debated local issue of a proposed nuclear power plant on the reservation. While many members of the tribe feel the dangers of the plant outweigh any possible benefits, Ella soon has to wonder whether at least one person isn't willing to kill for the potential profits. Sue Stone