Shutter (Rita Todacheene)
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Rita Todacheene is a forensic photographer working for the Albuquerque police force. Her excellent skills have cracked many cases—she is almost supernaturally good at capturing details. In fact, Rita has been hiding a secret: she sees the
ghosts of crime victims who point her toward the clues that other investigators overlook.
As a lone portal to the living world for traumatized spirits, Rita is terrorized by nagging ghosts who won’t let her sleep and who sabotage her personal life. Her taboo and psychologically harrowing ability was what drove her away from the
Navajo reservation, where she was raised by her grandmother. It has isolated her from friends and gotten her in trouble with the law.
And now it might be what gets her killed.
When Rita is sent to photograph the scene of a supposed suicide on a highway overpass, the furious, discombobulated ghost of the victim—who insists she was murdered—latches onto Rita, forcing her on a quest for revenge against her
killers, and Rita finds herself in the crosshairs of one of Albuquerque’s most dangerous cartels. Written in sparkling, gruesome prose, Shutter is an explosive debut from one of crime fiction’s most powerful new voices.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This debut supernatural thriller by Diné author Ramona Emerson blends police-procedural tension with a quietly literary sensibility. Rita Todacheene is a forensic photographer on the verge of burnout—an exhaustion complicated by her secret ability to see ghosts. When Rita photographs the body of a young woman thrown from an overpass into highway traffic, the victim’s powerful, persistent spirit pushes her into a drug cartel–linked murder investigation. As Rita becomes increasingly entangled in the case, the story incorporates memories of her childhood on the Navajo reservation, where she was raised by her grandmother and first learned to live with her unsettling gift. Emerson grounds the supernatural elements in lived experience, using Rita’s sight not as a gimmick but as a lens for grief, responsibility, and cultural inheritance. Charley Flyte’s narration balances restraint and quiet intensity, deepening Emerson’s lyrical prose. Shutter is a striking debut that blends a brutal procedural and a mournful coming-of-age story into something intimate, haunting, and unexpectedly tender.
