SINKING SUSPICIONS

A half-Cherokee woman’s checkered career path is strewn with fatalities.

Sadie Walela was once suspected of murdering the former owner of the restaurant she bought. After she started a job in a bank, a robber killed one of her co-workers. Now she’s taken a job as a travel agent, with a trip to Hawaii thrown in as a perk. She can’t convince her boyfriend, lawman Lance Smith, to accompany her, but he does plan to watch her horse and wolf-dog while she’s away. Barely has she boarded the plane when more things start to go wrong. Her neighbor, World War II veteran and full-blooded Cherokee Buck Skinner, goes missing, and Lance calls her for suggestions about where he might be. On Buck’s kitchen table are letters from the IRS threatening to take his ranch for back taxes. Buck turns out to be a victim of a particularly nasty case of identity theft. When a man calling himself Buck Skinner kills a chicken factory employee, the real Buck ends up suspected of murdering the man who impersonated him. Buck has fallen into a sinkhole, and even though Sonny the wolf-dog finds him while Sadie’s away, there seems no way he can get help. Sadie, for her part, has a wonderful time in Hawaii except for an earthquake and a lot of misunderstandings with Lance. Upon her return, Sonny leads her to Buck, whose niece from California starts pressuring him to sell water from the pure spring on his property. Sadie, whose true calling may be as a sleuth, works hard to straighten out the mess and provide a happier ending than she can easily envision.

Hoklotubbe (The American Café, 2011, etc.) uses her experiences growing up in Oklahoma as a Cherokee tribal citizen to add interest to her mystery.