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DESERT NOIR
by Betty Webb
Poisoned Pen Press, June 2001
240 pages
$23.95
ISBN: 1890208639


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Lena Jones gave up being a cop after being shot in the hip. That doesn't mean that her life has been spent knitting afghans. She's joined forces with a young man named Jimmy Sisiwan to form an agency known as Desert Investigations in Scottsdale, Arizona. Jimmy is a Pima Indian who was raised by a Mormon family in Utah. He's returned to his roots and sports shoulder-length black hair and Pima tribal tattoos on his face. Their specialty is computer security. They are hired to see if they can break into the computer systems of their clients. Jimmy is a genius at this type of work. Lena isn't. She's more into the standard PI stuff.

Lena soon finds herself with a job that she doesn't want. Her friend, Clarice Kobe, who is the owner of the Western Heart art gallery, is found beaten to death. The immediate suspect is her estranged husband, a jerk by the name of Jay Kobe, who is arrested after the police find his blood-stained shoes in the garbage. Jay hires Lena, which she is not delighted about since she finds him about one millimeter above pond scum. Unfortunately, he may not be guilty. At the time of the murder he was in bed with his girlfriend and drunker than the proverbial skunk.

In addition to searching for Clarice's killer, Lena is very involved in trying to uncover the mystery of her own past. At the age of 4, she was abandoned at a hospital with a bullet wound to the head. The incident haunts her, since she has no memory of it. Was she a victim of child abuse or the lone survivor of a family tragedy? It is important to Lena to establish her identity. She ended up living in a series of foster homes and is emotionally scarred as a result. She struggles to connect with others, not willing to admit to having any feelings for anyone, even her boyfriend of 4 years.

In trying to find out who killed Clarice, Lena finds that her friend was not all that she seemed. She came from a totally dysfunctional family. Her sister is a drug addict, her brother a ne'er-do-well. Her mother is an alcoholic who doesn't love any of her children. And her father-well, does it help to know that Clarice had filed a civil suit against him because of an incestuous relationship? The entire Hyath family are a bit unbelievable since they are all so damaged. Could one of her own family have killed her? Or perhaps it was the Apache artist that she had a screaming fight with after she rejected his art.

There is another level of death going on in this book beyond the killing of Clarice. Scottsdale is being destroyed by an influx of residents. Construction of new homes is moving the city's borders into the desert. As a result, the environment is desecrated. Coyotes who are starving because they've lost their hunting grounds are showing up in the city instead, making them subject to being killed by scared residents. There is also another kind of destruction at work, the destruction of hundreds of years of native American and Hispanic culture. Adobe homes that have housed the population for many years are leveled and replaced by the latest urban behemoths.

Desert Noir is Webb's first book and shows promise of good things to come. One of the best parts of the book was the denouement, where Lena and the killer are stranded in the desert with no protection from the heat and no water for 3 days. Lena exhibits great resourcefulness, a trait that I would have liked to seen applied more to the resolution of the murder. Lena Jones was certainly an interesting and complex character, but she seemed trapped in a standard PI mode. The pacing of the narrative was a bit off, and the investigation could have moved forward more quickly.

Webb does a wonderful job of placing the reader in the setting, and her love of the area's people and history are evident. Lena Jones is someone I definitely look forward to meeting again.

Reviewed by Maddy Van Hertbruggen, April 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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