The Poison of War by Jennifer Leeper

 

Regina’s mother was born in a brothel and died in one nearly five years before Frank pursued Regina for murder. Regina’s father, a drunk like Russell’s dad, died from his life inside the bottle when his daughter was nineteen, leaving her with only memories of a childhood where she was on her own. He hadn’t abused her, but she was neglected. It was a well-distributed fact among those that knew her. This included Frank. Regina’s only sibling, an older brother, was imprisoned in California for selling stolen car parts. He was the only one in Regina’s family who had left the reservation, and he wasn’t even a free man. Varying strains of alcoholism; from a drunk, maternal uncle stumbling off a bridge, to a paternal aunt beaten to death by an alcoholic boyfriend, had claimed Regina’s extended family. That left no one to question in that bloodline. She was cursed, but only in the way that everyone on the reservation was cursed.

This volume came from a list titled “The 24 Best Mystery Novels Featuring Native American Detectives.”

It is a bit brief to be called a novel and that may be part of the problem.

The extract clearly shows craft, it has the isolation of Reservation life down pat.

The hook, or crime itself is suitably baroque to attract initial interest but…it moves so quickly to justify the chess moves of solving the “big mystery” character and motivation becomes a bit blurred.

Keep in mind, this evaluation may just be me, I am increasingly impatient with “murder” stories, crime stories as they seem to all remind me this is exactly what Dashiell Hammett was doing in the ‘20s and early 30’s and no matter how well-written [and this one is that] we wind up in the same place Hammett was almost 100 years ago.

There are allowances here and there for variation in the crime itself or the personal peccadillos of the investigator, but essentially all seems to be spinning wheels in a single man’s rut.

As one can tell, this crime-jaded reader is no reliable indicator of the quality of this genre.

I always want something more than just another episode.

Leeper has chops, but I’ve seen this show before.

Leeper gets high marks, the demerits are mine.