Wind Spirit by Aimee and David Thurlo

There are several wonderful series set out west, such as Tony Hillerman's books featuring Joe Leaphorn. So when Tony Hillerman recommends a book, I pay attention. Recently, I read Wind Spirit by Aimee and David Thurlo (2004); it is part of the Ella Clah series. Ella is a young Navajo police officer and a single parent who is caught between the culture of her people and that of the outside world.

As the book begins, she attends a ceremony at a mine that is being closed up; she sees her nephew and other boys playing in an area that she deems unsafe, and gets them to move. However, part of the ceremony includes using some powerful explosives to seal up the mine; this also creates or opens several holes and Ella and her nephew start to fall down into one of them. Ella is able to save her nephew but cannot save herself. She tries to get out, but finds herself suffocating in sand and dirt from above. She then has a strange experience--she sees her husband Eugene, who died, and her father, who became a Christian minister, and was murdered a decade ago. She is told she has been given a choice: stay there with them or return to her life.

Ella doesn't want to leave; however, she cannot bear the idea of leaving her daughter behind, so she tells them that she must return. The next thing she knows, people are bending over her, trying to revive her. It seems that they had given up and pulled a blanket over her--then she sat up! For many of the Navajo who are traditionalists, there is something disturbing about this, because they are afraid that Ella has been contaminated by the spirits of some miners who died. Those who are Christians see it as a miracle. But many are afraid of her, and her family encourages her to have a singer perform a special song/prayer/blessing to lift the sense of a curse.

I found this novel very intriguing: there is a surface similarity to Tony Hillerman's stories, since both explore the culture of the Native Americans and focus on the daily lives of law enforcement officers solving crimes on the reservations of the west. However, while I enjoy Hillerman's characters, I found the Thurlos to be skilled story tellers as well, and was intrigued by the perspective of a young woman who left her family and culture behind, and then returned.

Now that I have had a chance to look at the authors' website, I see that again I stumbled onto a series late in the game; I need to work backwards and read the earlier books. The first one in the series is Blackening Song; it dates to 1995. As far as the Thurlos go, David grew up on the Navajo Reservation and taught school there until he retired. Aimee is Cuban. They live in New Mexico. If you are interested in learning more about the authors or the series, check out their website.



You can find all of their books in the Mystery section of the WPL.

c Waterloo Public Library 2009