Shooting Chant
A Ella Clah Novel
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A Navajo Police Special Investigator walks a dangerous line between two worlds in this gripping mystery thriller.
Once an FBI agent, Ella Clah is now a Special Investigator with the Navajo Police. She walks a tightrope between the Navajo and white worlds, fully accepted by neither but needed by both. Ella's brother, Clifford, a hataali or medicine man, says that her investigative skills are a gift from the spirits who guard and guide the Dineh, but Ella insists it's her FBI training that has honed her instincts.
Ella's life is about to change in ways she can barely begin to imagine--she is newly pregnant, and though she knows who the father is, she will not marry him. In Navajo society, her child will be of her clan, and will be accepted by her family, no matter what--but how can she stay a police officer, exposing herself and her unborn child to terrible danger day after day?
Given her current caseload, it's hard for Ella to put off making a final decision about her career. There's a near-riot at LabKote, a factory on the Reservation that produces high-quality vessels for medical labs. The Fierce Ones, an activist group of Navajo, are insisting that more native workers be hired by the firm--including a Navajo replacement for a manager recently found dead in his car, an apparent suicide. A sniper shoots at Ella as she drives to another crime scene--the home of State Senator James Yellowhair, who has been kidnapped.
Feuding between traditionalist and modernist elements in the Navajo nation heats up with sabotage, vandalism, and murder, spurred by a rise in birth defects among the Dineh's livestock and rustling of sheep and cattle. Ella's personal concerns mount when officers investigating a break-in at the health clinic discover that the records of several pregnant women--including Ella--are missing. Then one of the pregnant women is murdered....
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Special investigator Ella Clah of the Navajo Tribal Police gets taken for an exceptionally rough ride in this fifth novel in the series (after Enemy Way), as she confronts a murder investigation, intra-tribal cultural tensions, medical misconduct and family troubles. When a body turns up in the parking lot of Anglo-run LabKote, a company selling sterilized hospital and medical supplies and located on the "Rez," Clah and her small crew launch an investigation. Soon they find themselves trying to unravel a crime wave before it overwhelms the Rez's delicate balance. Meanwhile, tribal tensions, fed by competitions at an Agricultural Society show, are flaring between traditionalists and progressives, with the consequences escalating from petty vandalism to serious hostilities. A break-in at the local medical clinic puts still more strain on Clah's small group and their limited resources, as does the kidnapping of a Native politician, especially when clues point to the Fierce Ones--a vigilante group with which Clah's brother is associated. And Clah's secret pregnancy is also beginning to take its toll. New Mexico-based and partly Navajo Reservation-reared, the Thurlos mix social commentary with plot-twisting suspense in a well-developed and unsentimental tale.
