Spirit Sickness - Hardcover

From the author of Cry Dance comes a new suspense thriller in the tradition of Tony Hillerman and Joseph Wambaugh.  Spirit Sickness reunites Bureau of Indian Affairs Criminal Investigator Emmett Quanah Parker and FBI Special Agent Anna Turnipseed, two Native American cops torn between their heritage and the law.

A burned-out police cruiser, gutted by fire in a remote part of the Navajo reservation, bears witness to a horrific crime.  Inside are the bodies of a tribal patrolman and his wife.  Even more chilling, the bodies were left to greet death in the traditional Navajo way:  the killer has smashed a window to let loose the chindis, the spirits of the dead.

As BIA Investigator Emmett Quanah Parker knows, a cop's murder is never simple, raising countless questions and suspicions.  Parker and FBI Special Agent Anna Turnipseed must make their way through a tangle of lies and misdirection, sift through an assortment of suspects, and work around the sexual tension between them that neither can hide nor ignore.  Then another murder complicates the case even more, exploding their investigation into an unimaginable realm.

The latest killing makes it clear that an inhumanly cunning mind is at work, weaving personal madness with a complex mix of Navajo mythology and superstition.  Both Parker, a Comanche, and Turnipseed, a Modoc, are well acquainted with the eerie shadowland between native myth and modern homicide investigation.  But now they will have to tear down the barriers they have constructed to separate heritage from professional duties.  They must embrace the attitudes they have long submerged under cold rationalism, and hope to touch minds with a murderer who has created his own reality-and with it the need to kill and kill again.

Following a serpentine trail through Navajo gangs and methamphetamine runners, Parker and Turnipseed are on the scent of a cold and ancient evil.  And they must find it before a killer erupts in a final outburst of blood fury and madness.