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Overview
In the hot, dry New Mexico wilderness, Will and Billy, two half-Cherokee ranchers, discover a corpse and a suitcase containing nearly a million dollars. As the two friends contemplate what to do with the money, they set into motion a series of events that will cost them more than they want to pay.
Volume 41 in the American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series
Synopsis
In the hot, dry New Mexico wilderness, Will and Billy, two half-Cherokee ranchers, discover a corpse and a suitcase containing nearly a million dollars. As the two friends contemplate what to do with the money, they set into motion a series of events that will cost them more than they want to pay.
Publishers Weekly
After Billy Keene sees a dead body and a suitcase fall from the sky in rural New Mexico, he and his hunting buddy Will Striker, both of them half-Cherokee, decide to keep the $850,000 they find in the suitcaseand so begins Owens's solemn and surely told third Native American crime thriller (after Bone Game, 1994). Immediately, the two friends are attacked from above by a helicopter, which they shoot down in a brief battle. They try to hide the money along with any evidence of the shoot-out, but soon the local sheriff informs them of an impending investigation. Their task grows even more difficult when Billy begins a romance with a beautiful, mysterious Native American woman, and when Billy's elderly grandfatherwho attempts to call on ancient Native American forces to extricate the friends from their predicamentdisappears from the family ranch. After a local drug dealer comes calling to recover the cash, a series of violent confrontations erupts. Owens handles Billy and Will's romantic difficulties with compassion, adding resonance to a well-wrought thriller capped by a twist-filled climax. (Aug.)
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
After Billy Keene sees a dead body and a suitcase fall from the sky in rural New Mexico, he and his hunting buddy Will Striker, both of them half-Cherokee, decide to keep the $850,000 they find in the suitcaseand so begins Owens's solemn and surely told third Native American crime thriller (after Bone Game, 1994). Immediately, the two friends are attacked from above by a helicopter, which they shoot down in a brief battle. They try to hide the money along with any evidence of the shoot-out, but soon the local sheriff informs them of an impending investigation. Their task grows even more difficult when Billy begins a romance with a beautiful, mysterious Native American woman, and when Billy's elderly grandfatherwho attempts to call on ancient Native American forces to extricate the friends from their predicamentdisappears from the family ranch. After a local drug dealer comes calling to recover the cash, a series of violent confrontations erupts. Owens handles Billy and Will's romantic difficulties with compassion, adding resonance to a well-wrought thriller capped by a twist-filled climax. (Aug.)KLIATT
Nightland is the area to the west—the source of unknown dangers. Two present-day Cherokees, hunting deer in the Magdalena Mountains, where Geronimo and his fellow Apaches once inspired waves of fear, watch dumbstruck as a man plummets from the sky and dies, impaled on a tree. Had he fallen from a passing airplane? Near him lands a well-padded suitcase. Surely the considerable amount of cash it contains is drug money. After weighing questions of conscience and consequence, the men carry the heavy suitcase to their ancient Toyota Land Cruiser. They have not gone far when a helicopter lands, cued by a radio in the suitcase. After exchanging gunfire with the two Cherokees, it rises into the sky and then explodes. The men split the money—almost a million dollars—and take it to their poor homes. This is a superbly written novel, full of cultural context and symbolism, a meld of the ancient and the modern. The characters are complex, multidimensional. An especially intriguing character is Siquani, the men's old grandfather, who is finely tuned to the spirit world in the ancient way. Though all the characters, heroes, culprits, victims, and police, are Indian or of mixed blood, the book is not just for Native American audiences. It will appeal to readers who love a tinge of the supernatural in their mysteries, and who will appreciate that this story authentically draws from Native American culture. The tale contains several sensuous love scenes and a character delineated by profanity. The characters lecture too much in part of the story, but most of it is very visceral, very visual. It grabs the reader and doesn't let go. It would make a great movie. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior highschool students, advanced students, and adults. 1996, Univ. of Oklahoma Press, Red River Books, 217p., BoardmanLibrary Journal
Owens (Bone Game, LJ 9/1/94) mines a rich vein of Native American lore and landscape in this buddy thriller about two half-Cherokee ranchers in New Mexico. As dried up as their land, Will and Billy support themselves by rounding up cattle for other ranchers. When they conspire to divide up a dead man's million dollars, they set evil forces in motion that propel them into the dark Cherokee Nightland, ,from which only Will emerges. Most of the flashbacks are skillfully woven into the fabric of the narrative, but when they're not the pace sags. Owens, of Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish descent, delivers multidimensional characters, quirky humor, and a lyrical sensitivity to Cherokee tradition that hovers on myth. A unique combination of literary style, strong story, and American Indian culture makes Nightland an appealing addition to fiction collections.Molly Gorman, San Marino, Cal.Kirkus Reviews
A Native American Richard Condon might have conjured up this neatly plotted thriller, a wonderful companion to Owens's two previous novels, The Sharpest Sight (1992) and Bone Game (1994).The story begins with a very real bang when part-Cherokee ranchers and lifelong friends Billy Keene and Will Striker come upon a dead body and a suitcase containing a million dollars. It looks as if the body has literally fallen from the sky. "It's a gift from the Great Spirit," Billy insists, but a hail of gunfire from a helicopter makes it seem likely that the Spirit's bounty won't be easy to hold onto. Outwitting their pursuers and hiding their windfall, the two try to settle inconspicuously back into the routines of their hard lives, scraping by in a New Mexico backwater. Events, however, rapidly turn deeply weird. Billy's grandfather Siquani, a believer in the power of the ancestral forces surrounding them, is visited by a ghost (possibly the ghost of the man with the suitcase) who plays checkers with the old man and teaches him how to drive, precipitating one of the plot's many delicious twists and turns. Equally memorable appearances are made by: Will's estranged wife Jace, now a big-city lawyer; Odessa Nighthawk, a steely half-breed Ph.D. whose amorous appropriation of Billy is just a mite suspicious (there's evidence she may be a shape-shifter); and Paco Ortega, a thoughtful drug smuggler who, accompanied by a hilariously foulmouthed gunsel, comes to claim all that belongs to him. Owens skillfully braids together deadpan comedy, Indian legend and superstition, and stringent criticism of White American injustice ("everything in the psyche of this country tells people that they can just put the past behind them, that they aren't responsible for yesterday") in a swiftly paced tale that's as thoughtful and provocative as it is irresistibly entertaining.
Tony Hillerman, take notice. This is how it's done.