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.
Amber Foxx Mysteries 