Tag: crime fiction

A New Mexico Mystery Review: Shutter by Ramona Emerson

Unique, breathtaking, intense—and somehow occasionally funny in the midst of tragedy and horror—Shutter is one of the most original books I’ve read in years. Forensic photographer Rita Todacheene is gifted with not only skill in her work but with a spirit world connection. The gift is a burden, provoking concern and conflict in her family and in her workplace and creating profound stress in her personal life, but the ghosts will not leave her alone.

The structure of the book, alternating between Rita’s earlier life on the Navajo  reservation and her work with the Albuquerque Police Department, gives depth and balance to the story. As a reader, I needed the reprieve from the APD. I cherished the time with Grandma, and got to know Rita through her roots, seeing the person she was before she became immersed in some of the ugliest murders in the city.

And those murders are horrific. Normally, I’d have struggled had get through the crime scenes, but Rita’s perspective made them compelling—seeing them through her eyes, through her lens, through her commitment to the dead. The reader can’t look away because Rita can’t. Neither her job nor the victims will let her.

I’ve only seen a ghost once. She chilled me to the bone. At least she went away and never came back. Rita’s ghosts linger, cling, persist, and return. Some are angry and desperate; some are benevolent. They can see her and communicate with her. Emerson makes them as real as the living characters.

I admire her writing skill. She doesn’t explain but allows readers to intuit through immersion. I never sensed Rita talking to an audience in the narration, though it’s first person. There’s a brush with the confrontation-and-confession trope, but it’s short and does no harm to the pace or to the plausibility of the moment. I felt that Rita wasn’t really a smoker, that this habit might have been an afterthought in some stage of revision in order to put her in the right place at the right time, but her flawed coping skills overall make her human and make her surges of strength all the more admirable.

If you appreciate a realistic crime story, a powerful ghost story, and an authentic New Mexico setting, this is your book.

Learn more about the author in this NPR archive interview.

 

A New Mexico Mystery Review: The Painter

While this is a novel about crime at one level, a nerve-stretching, page-turning suspense story, it’s also the story of a man’s soul, his deepest loves, his darkest corners, his inner light, his passions, and his art. Heller gets inside the process of Jim Stegner’s whole being. When you read this book, you, feel as if you are Jim. You wade into his favorite fishing streams with him, experience his blinding rages with him, fall into the flow of creative inspiration with him, and feel every twist and turn in the road with him, as he navigates his grief over his teenaged daughter’s death, his fame, and his conflict with a dangerous man whose family doesn’t forgive or forget. Ever.

Jim is no saint, but he stands up for the weak, and he does it with fists. When he sees a man beating a horse, Jim fights with him in front of witnesses, breaks the man’s nose and liberates the horse. And so begins Jim’s trip to hell. There are stops in brief but intense heavens of love, painting and fishing, but this time Jim’s inner demons have pulled in some real ones, and they won’t leave him alone.

The landscape of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado is so alive as seen through this painter and fisherman’s eyes that it’s virtually a character in the book. The people in Jim’s life—his model Sofia, his friends, his oft-remembered late daughter, the police who question him—are vivid and multi-dimensional, and even the passing minor characters are so finely portrayed they seem to have lives beyond the story. The scenes revolving around art in Santa Fe are drawn from life: the wealthy collectors, the galleries, and the lionizing of the famous man. As scandal and suspicion grow around Jim, so does the value of his art. The confluence of the public pressure for pictures and interviews with the inner pressure from his emotions and the sense of being hunted like prey come together in an explosive and unexpected conclusion.

For an interview with the author about this book, go to

http://www.peterheller.net/media/peter-in-the-media/

and click on the video for The Painter. The story behind the book is as fascinating as the book itself.

About the artist who inspired the author to create Jim Stegner:

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