Friday, December 16, 2011

Desert Wind-Betty Webb

Desert Wind


Betty Webb

Poisoned Pen, Feb 7 2012, $24.95

ISBN 9781590589816



Pima Indian Jimmy Sisiwan, a private investigator, heads home to Walapai Flats, Arizona to be there for his adopted brother, Ted Olmstead, whose wife Kimama the activist founder of Victims of Uranium Mining was recently murdered. The local police hold Ted; they believe, in retaliation to his wife’s murder, he killed public relations specialist Ike Donohue, who represented mining interests with the planned opening of the Black Basin Uranium Mine. Roger Tosches, owner of the mine, has a sordid history as he managed another uranium facility, which caused the cancerous deaths of many and poisoned the Navaho reservation where this mine was located.



The police arrest Jimmy as a material witness to the Donahue homicide. His partner in Desert Investigations Lena Jones arrives at the scene to help Jimmy and his extended family. She soon finds links to the 1954 Wayne film The Conqueror while learning the truth about an organization like the government (at all levels) protecting itself from the scandal of the impact of aboveground atomic bomb testing on Downwinders back in the 1950s.



This is an exciting timely Desert thriller (see Desert Lost).in which author Betty Webb provides insight into why officials prefer potential crimes that would embarrass the organization if surfaced to remain interred without justice. Whether it is Penn State or the Atomic Energy Commission and even with Wayne and much of the film crew dying from cancer yet hardly a blink from leaders. Jones is at her best with this inquiry that is fast-paced as the sleuth and readers learn a lot about whose rights are defended and whose are nuked away under the concept of sovereign immunity as the “king can do no wrong.”



Harriet Klausner



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