Ok, not great - however, it is the first in the series and one can hope that she improves with practice.
It is an unusual detective team - an Irish Catholic Priest and a "Janet Peet" character, an Arapaho woman who has been away, become a lawyer, and returned to the tribe. It is clear that the priest "admires" the woman a bit more than is strictly appropriate given his chosen profession.
The basic story is pretty solid, although the title seems to be only minimally related - something which I always find annoying. Another problem is that several times she leaves glaring pointers which she then drops. I found myself continually irritated by a couple of verbal mannerisms - maybe I should call them bad habits. The story is set on the Arapaho reservation in Wyoming. For the most part, life on the rez sounds a lot like life on the rez in a Hillerman novel. We all know how people dress out here. So why, for crying out loud, does she never simply refer to someone's hat as a hat - it is always his "cowboy hat." I don't know of anyone who calls a cowboy's hat a cowboy hat except possibly six-year-olds in the Northeast. But it is always a "cowboy hat": "He pushed his cowboy hat back on his forehead." "He grabbed his cowboy hat as he ran from the house." Sounds silly. Slightly more subtle perhaps - she never simply refers to a character (even one we have met fifty times) by name, it is always "the Arapaho man or women or boy or whatever".
One can hope that these flaws will be overcome in further works - after all there are ten or twelve of these now. I will read another - because a friend recommended them, not for their compelling narrative and insight into a modern Native American society.
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