The Reader's Shelf: Mysteries from the Windy State

By Nancy Pearl -- Library Journal, 10/1/2006

Since Oklahoma is a state with a varied terrain, the weather changes frequently. But the wind remains pretty constant: always sweeping down the plain. Sometimes, the wind brings murder along with it. In the following mysteries set in Oklahoma, the weather, the season—and the wind—are as important as the locale, the characters, and the plot.

Fred Harris's Okie Dunn mysteries richly depict the late 1930s in Vernon, a small town in “the eternal wind of southwestern Oklahoma.” His debut, Coyote Revenge (o.p.), opens with a cold-blooded double murder. Ray Lee Dunn, known as “Okie” because he was born on November 16, Oklahoma statehood day, takes the sheriff's job when his best friend, Sheriff Dub Ready, is also killed. Incidentally, Harris is a former U.S. senator from Oklahoma, so while he may not know much about murder, he's probably familiar with character assassination and other dirty tricks.

Weaving Cherokee culture and folklore into murder plots, Jean Hager offers up five Chief Mitchell Bushyhead mysteries set in Buckskin, a small town near Tahlequah, the Cherokee County seat in northeastern Oklahoma. Police Chief Bushyhead, a widower with a teenage daughter, is half-Cherokee, considered an outsider to the full-bloods. The inventive plot of Fire Carrier (o.p.), the fourth in the series, incorporates the Cherokee myth of Atsil'-dihye'gi,' a phantom who walks at night carrying a torch.

Hager is also the author of four mysteries featuring Cherokee Nation crimes investigator Molly Bearpaw, each set during a different season in Tahlequah. The Spirit Caller (Warner. 1998. ISBN 0-446-60595-6. pap. $6.99), the last in the series, takes place in the spring. Molly clashes with the sheriff over her handling of the hanging death of Talia Wind, a New Age follower. Molly's own father, who returns after many years' absence, becomes a suspect.

Chantalene Morrell, who's half-Gypsy, perceives auras and has prescient dreams. In M.K. Preston's Perhaps She'll Die (Intrigue. 2001. ISBN 1-890768-33-2. $23.95; pap. 2004. ISBN 1-890768-58-8. $13), Chantalene returns to Tetumka, a town in Choctaw country in southeastern Oklahoma, to find out who lynched her father when she was 12 years old. She's hot on the trail, but Big Willie Bond, the butcher, is killed before he can tell her the truth. In Song of the Bones (Intrigue. 2003. ISBN 1-890768-54-5. $24.95), Chantalene agrees to help Thelma Patterson track down her husband, Billy Ray, who disappeared 30 years ago. Soon, a man claiming to be Billy Ray appears in Tetumka.

In Letter from Home (Berkley Prime Crime. 2004. ISBN 0-425-19882-0. pap. $6.99), Carolyn Hart combines a young girl's coming-of-age story with a murder mystery too good to miss. When Faye Tatum, the mother of her best friend Barb, is murdered, 14-year-old Gretchen Grace Gilman, a reporter for the local newspaper (all the able-bodied male reporters are off to fight the war), tries to find out whodunit and why. Set in the summer of 1944 in northeastern Oklahoma, where “that old familiar Oklahoma wind” blows dust through town, Hart's novel perfectly captures the World War II period.

In 1934, Tom Freshour, a half-Indian prosecutor with the county court in Fort Smith, AR, is assigned to the case of the beating death of Lee Guessner, an artifact collector. Freshour's investigation takes him into Oklahoma's Winding Stair Mountains, to the Spiro Mound, an Indian burial site recently discovered along Highway 66 to Tulsa. In addition to being an excellent mystery, Speer Morgan's The Freshour Cylinders (MacAdam/Cage. 1998. ISBN 1-878448-84-6. $23; pap. 2000. ISBN 1-878448-99-4. $13) offers startling descriptions of the wind, heat, and dust of southeastern Oklahoma during the Depression.

Letha Albright's mysteries feature Viv Powers, a newspaper reporter who prefers footwork to paperwork, which gets her into trouble most of the time. In Tulsa Time (Oak Tree Pr. 2000. ISBN 1-892343-12-6. pap. $11.95), Charley Pack, Viv's rock musician boyfriend, is jailed for murder. Viv begins to doubt that he is innocent, but she has to try to figure out why he won't talk. In Daredevil's Apprentice (Memento Mori Mysteries: Avocet. 2002. ISBN 0-9705049-4-2. pap. $12.95), Viv hunts a killer after her best friend, Cherokee artist Lucie Dreadfulwater—who had killed a man—is murdered. Albright lushly describes northeastern Oklahoma and “the ever-present Oklahoma wind.” Bad Luck Woman (Memento Mori Mysteries: Avocet. 2005. ISBN 0-9725078-5-X. $24.95) has Viv caught up in an ongoing conflict between a group of Indian activists and a corporation whose goals are—of course—making money.