Dreaming Back

Seven years after the appearance of Kabul , Hirsh pens another mystery with a mission, investigating the use, and restriction, of drugs in official experiments, subliminal messages in alcohol advertising, the fragility of Native American sovereignty and how U.S. business interests and the government can manipulate these arenas to their advantage. Leni Haring, a teacher in New Mexico, is strangled in her home the night before she was to fly to Boston to ask her father, a retired MIT scientist who once had security clearance, if he could find out why an unmarked helicopter is prospecting at night on sacred Hopi land. When Leigh Haring visits her sister's house, she finds a laptop computer and a loaded gun carefully secreted; she cannot find her sister's half-Hopi lover, Ben Naya, because as a prime suspect, he has gone into hiding. With the occasional help of Ed Harris, a friend of Leni and Ben, Leigh probes the mystery of her sister's death and learns an important secret about their family history that Leni kept for years. Readers who want a straightforward, gripping yarn are advised to look elsewhere; those interested in the issues Hirsh raises--and able to bear the prose's intermittent elliptical pretentiousness--may find this mystery-with-a-message worth their while. (Oct.)