THE DIVIDING LINE
by Richard Parrish
Parrish shelves the moral ambiguities of Our Choice of Gods (1989) for strenuously unsophisticated melodrama—in a fashionably multicultural mystery introducing Joshua Rabb (a transplanted Brighton Beach lawyer who lost his wife to a car crash and his left arm to WW II) of the Tucson Bureau of Indian Affairs. Unlike his craven predecessor, Joshua loses no time declaring his independence from powerful Senator Jacob Lukis, who's determined to negotiate mineral rights from under the local Papago reservation—only to find himself threatened with harassment and blackmail, then defending Chief Macario Antone's grandson Ignacio on a murder charge that the whole town's eager to press. Enough bullying lawmen, lynch mobs, truehearted women, scared (but courageous) children, and stand-up heroes who can do the right thing to make the ramshackle plot read like the prospectus for a whole series—and more entries are reportedly in the works. Not that Tony Hillerman has any cause for alarm.