Ella Clah Novels (Paperback)
9 total works
Formerly an FBI agent, Ella Clah has returned to the reservation and is now a special investigator with the Navajo police force. When the daughter of Senator Yellowhair is killed in a suspicious car accident, the senator accuses Ella and the tribe's medical examiner, Dr. Carolyn Roanhorse, of tampering with evidence and falsifying the autopsy results. The fact that the young woman's body is mutilated and that Dr. Roanhorse's samples disappear doesn't help the mood on the reservation, already tense due to conflict between whites and Indians at the Navajo-owned mine. An outbreak of meningitis further disrupts Navajo life as the reservation's inhabitants must decide whether or not to he vaccinated. Those who follow the old ways reject modern medicine, preferring to trust in the tribe's hataalis, but many attend vaccination clinics - only to flee when Navajos begin dying from an unknown disease. Ella is convinced that somehow all these things tie together, but finding the connections is difficult and dangerous. Threats come from all sides, and clues lead Ella to suspect that Navajo witches may somehow be involved, putting not only her life but her soul in danger.
Solving her father's murder taught FBI agent Ella Clah a great deal about herself and her people, the Dineh, or Navajo. She isn't sure she believes everything she experienced while tracking down the Navajo witches who killed her father, but she now knows that there is more to the world than can be explained by her FBI training and forensic science. Now a special investigator with the tribal police on the Navajo Reservation, Ella is stunned when one of the Dineh's "living treasures" - people who hold and teach the cultural and religious wisdom of the tribe - is brutally murdered. Ritual signs at the murder scene seem to point to skinwalkers, or Navajo witches, but Ella thought they'd all been killed or captured. Ella has too many suspects and too few clues, even after other old wise ones are found dead. Despite help from the Navajo pathologist, Carolyn Roanhorse, a woman as much an outsider within the tribe as Ella herself, Ella makes little progress. To make matters worse, Peterson Yazzie, head of the skinwalkers, has escaped, and once again stalks the Clah family. Illusion and ritual duel with police procedures and science as Ella strives to find out who is stealing the mind and heart of the Navajo people.
"A construction crew found the first body. The cops found three more, in a cluster that lay on both sides of the border of the Navajo Reservation. Because some of the bodies were buried outside the Rez, Navajo Police Special Investigator Ella Clah and her team must work a delicate joint investigation with the New Mexico police. Identifying the dead isn't easy--some had been buried for years--and at first the cases look to be nothing but dead ends. Then one of the bodies turns out to be that of a missing man who was believed to have embezzled funds from his construction firm and suspicions focus on the man's partner. With no obvious links between any of the corpses and the anniversary of their deaths fast approaching, Ella feels frustrated by the investigation's lack of progress. Unless they can find what connects these victims, someone else may soon be killed. Ella's ability to concentrate is battered by worries about her teenage daughter, who has been skipping school, and her mother, who is cooking up a storm, a sure sign that trouble is brewing in the household. Black Thunder, an Ella Clah novel, is a police procedural mystery that should appeal to all readers. "--