Bad Medicine (Ella Clah Series #3)

When the daughter of Senator Yellowhair is killed in a suspicious car accident, the Senator accuses Ella and the tribe's medical examiner, Dr. Carolyn Roanhorse, of falsifying the autopsy results. An outbreak of meningitis leads to more trouble when many of those who are vaccinated against the illness begin dying from a different, unidentified disease. Riots between Indian and white workers at the Navajo-owned mine stretch the resources of the tribal police even thinner.

Convinced that solving one mystery means solving them all, Ella plunges into her investigations despite threats from all sides and her suspicions that Navajo witches are somehow involved. Ella Clah has sworn to protect her people from all menaces—spiritual or physical—and she's not going to back off now.

Set on the Navajo reservation packed with Native American wisdom, Aimee and David Thurlo's Ella Clah novels are written with a sharp eye for conflict between the traditionalist and modernist ways of life. Former FBI Agent Ella Clah is now a special investigator with the native police force on the Navajo reservation. Ella's brother Clifford, a Hataali or medicine man, says that her investigative skills are gifts from the spirits who guard and guide the Navajo, but Ella insists it's her FBI training that has honed her instincts.

When the daughter of Senator Yellowhair is killed in a suspicious car accident, the Senator accuses Ella and the tribe's medical examiner, Dr. Carolyn Roanhorse, of tampering with evidence and falsifying the autopsy results. An outbreak of meningitis leads to more trouble when many of those who are vaccinated begin dying from an unknown disease. Riots between Indian and White workers at the Navajo-owned mine stretch the resources of the tribal police even thinner.

Convinced that solving one mystery means solving them all, Ella plunges into her investigations despite threats from all sides and her suspicions that Navajo witches are somehow involved. Ella Clah has sworn to protect her people from all menaces—spiritual and physical—and she's not going to back off now.

Kirkus Reviews

En route to a homicide scene—Navajo rights activist Stanley Bitah has been clubbed to death—tribal police officer Ella Clah stops to check out a report of a drunk driver, only to find that Angelina Yellowhair isn't drunk but that she'd been fatally poisoned even before her car crashes. The two apparently unrelated murders are an apt image for this overstuffed novel of Anglo-Navajo conflicts, suspicions, and animosities. Was Bitah killed by one of the fellow coal miners who resented his ties to the militant Navajo Justice Church, or is the murder the work of the white-supremacist Brotherhood, or of the Fierce Ones of the Navajo reservation? It's impossible for Ella to focus on that case, because Angelina's father, influential State Senator James Yellowhair, is leaning hard on Ella and her friend, tribal medical examiner Carolyn Roanhorse, to ignore forensic evidence that Angelina had drugs in her system and shut down that investigation. While Ella's struggling to balance her caseload without losing her cool with any of the dozens of hotheaded suspects, Angelina's tissue samples disappear; her poisoned organs follow; devastating infections break out among Carolyn's patients; and suddenly the medical examiner is on the way to being discredited, fired, and burned out of her home. To top it off, Ella's hated father-in-law is sending her taunting notes from beyond the grave. Where will it all end?

Like Ella's two previous cases (Death Walker, 1996, etc.), this one is too much of a good thing; trying to sort out the suspects and subplots is like wandering for hours and hours in a museum filled with fascinating exhibits.

Aimée and David Thurlo have been married for more than thirty years and have been writing novels together for nearly that long, in a variety of genres including romance, young adult, and mystery. They have three ongoing mystery series, the Sister Agatha series, starring a cloistered nun, the Lee Nez series, featuring a Navajo vampire who teams up with a female FBI agent to fight crimes that have elements of the supernatural, and their flagship series, the critically-acclaimed Ella Clah novels. Several Ella Clah novels, including Tracking Bear, Red Mesa, and Shooting Chant, have received starred reviews from Booklist.

David Thurlo was raised on the Navajo Indian Reservation and later taught school in Shiprock, also on the Rez. Aimée, a native of Havana, Cuba, has lived in New Mexico for more than thirty years. The Thurlos share their home with dogs, horses, and various pet rodents. They have written more than fifty novels which have been published in more than twenty countries.