Death Walker (Ella Clah Series #2)

Returning to the Navajo Reservation and solving her father's murder taught former FBI Agent Ella Clah a great deal about herself and her people, the Dineh. She has begun to accept that that there is more to the world than can be explained by FBI training and forensic science. Newly hired as a Special Investigator with the tribal police, Ella investigates the brutal murders of several of the Dineh's "living treasures," Navajos esteemed for their knowledge of the tribe's religious and cultural wisdom. Illusion and ritual duel with police procedures and science as Ella strives to find out who is destroying the heart of the tribe.

The second exciting mystery featuring Navajo Tribal Police investigator Ella Clah.

Publishers Weekly

The Thurlos introduced Ella Clah, former FBI agent who is now a special investigator for the Navajo tribal police at Shiprock in what is recognizably Tony Hillerman territory in Blackening Song. Like Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, Clah makes use of both her law enforcement training and her understanding of tribal traditions to investigate crime on the Navajo Reservation. When an elderly Navajo historian is murdered, Clah must separate fact from rumor and myth to find the culprit. Reservation gossip and artifacts at the crime scene point to the skinwalkers witch cult, villains of Blackening Song. Ella Clah is a tough, appealing heroine, who faces personal conflict between professional duty and pride in her heritage. But she's ill served by this loose plot, in which she and her assistant, Justine Goodluck, engage in repetitive interview scenes that slow the pace and blunt the suspense. Two more tribal Elders, specialists in ritual and the Navajo language, die before the investigators get on the right track-more than halfway through the book. Then everything quickly falls into place, and the tale ends with an anticlimactic final chase. Readers may wish that Chee or Leaphorn were around to step in when necessary and set this sidelined plot on a faster course. (June)

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.