Blackwater Falls

Readers familiar with the author's previous series will not be surprised to find that this novel has a highly diverse cast with a particular focus on the Muslim and immigrant experience. Here, instead of taking place in Canada, the action is set in a community outside Denver that is home to a meat-packing plant, a high=tech contractor providing sophisticated surveillance equipment deployed at the US border with Mexico, a popular evangelical Christian mega-church, a crew of tough Christian bikers who are muscle for the church, and a sheriff who runs the town like his personal fiefdom. returnreturnA group of Denver-based detectives have been brought into the town to investigate a murder that has created strains between the refugee community and the dominant White culture. A bright young Muslim girl has been found dead, her body displayed in a gruesome replica of an image of the virgin Mary. Soon the detectives hear hints that this isn't the only Muslim girl who may have become a victim. returnreturnI appreciate the way the author highlights immigrant and minority perspectives in her work, and the ways she probes the stresses between a law enforcement culture that is supposed to serve and protect and the too-often brutal experience of the public they police. Here, she also contrasts evangelical Christian nationalism and the spiritual life of her Muslim heroine. (There's also a tense romance thread that, frankly, I could do without.) returnreturnThough I enjoyed the book and found the characters well-developed, in the end I found the plot to be contrived. It may be that our times are so weird, so much stranger than fiction, that it's hard to know what will strike readers as plausible.