Sinking Suspicions

August 18, 2014
Set in 2004, Hoklotubbe’s amiable third Sadie Walela mystery (after 2011’s The American Café) finds the Oklahoma Cherokee pursing a new career as a travel agent. When Sadie is on an introductory trip to Maui to meet the folks at Playin’ in Paradise Travel, her neighbor, WWII vet Buck Skinner, goes missing. Buck’s troubles with the IRS and the discovery of a pair of murder victims turn the search for Buck into a manhunt led by Delaware County’s Sheriff Percy O’Leary and aided by Sadie’s lover, Lance Smith, police chief of Liberty, Okla. In Hawaii, Sadie meets a young woman, Pua Keola, whose mother, Tutu Lehua, shares some WWII reminiscences that point to a startling personal connection. On returning home, Sadie joins the hunt for Buck in an effort to prove him innocent of the murders, but her relationship with Lance suffers in the process. New readers will want to seek out the author’s earlier novels.

September 15, 2014
A half-Cherokee woman's checkered career path is strewn with fatalities. Sadie Walela was once suspected of murdering the former owner of the restaurant she bought. After she started a job in a bank, a robber killed one of her co-workers. Now she's taken a job as a travel agent, with a trip to Hawaii thrown in as a perk. She can't convince her boyfriend, lawman Lance Smith, to accompany her, but he does plan to watch her horse and wolf-dog while she's away. Barely has she boarded the plane when more things start to go wrong. Her neighbor, World War II veteran and full-blooded Cherokee Buck Skinner, goes missing, and Lance calls her for suggestions about where he might be. On Buck's kitchen table are letters from the IRS threatening to take his ranch for back taxes. Buck turns out to be a victim of a particularly nasty case of identity theft. When a man calling himself Buck Skinner kills a chicken factory employee, the real Buck ends up suspected of murdering the man who impersonated him. Buck has fallen into a sinkhole, and even though Sonny the wolf-dog finds him while Sadie's away, there seems no way he can get help. Sadie, for her part, has a wonderful time in Hawaii except for an earthquake and a lot of misunderstandings with Lance. Upon her return, Sonny leads her to Buck, whose niece from California starts pressuring him to sell water from the pure spring on his property. Sadie, whose true calling may be as a sleuth, works hard to straighten out the mess and provide a happier ending than she can easily envision. Hoklotubbe (The American Cafe, 2011, etc.) uses her experiences growing up in Oklahoma as a Cherokee tribal citizen to add interest to her mystery.

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September 1, 2014

When Sadie Walela sells her restaurant and attempts to try something different, she ends up in Maui negotiating with a travel agency about buying her friend Jan's franchise. Meanwhile, back in Oklahoma, boyfriend Lance Smith is searching for Buck Skinner, Sadie's irascible Cherokee neighbor who has disappeared after receiving several threatening letters from the IRS. When Lance and Sycamore Springs sheriff Charlie McCord find a body that they identify as Buck, confusion reigns. It's revealed that Buck was the victim of identity theft, and the corpse belongs to the thief. Was Buck responsible? Worried about her friend, Sadie hurries home, but Buck is a heroic World War II veteran, and his experience might just save him. VERDICT Following The American Cafe and Deception at All Costs, this third series outing set in Oklahoma's Cherokee country is leisurely paced and will attract fans of Jean Hager and her "Mitch Bushyhead" and "Molly Bearpaw" books. But Tony Hillerman readers wishing for more details on Cherokee life--and less about Hawaii--may be disappointed.

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