Spirit Sickness

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 sleep--but, 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)