Laura is a half-Hopi investigator who lives a shadowy life. Using a variety of aliases, she tries to live anonymously in and around Tucson, Arizona. She receives assignments by phone (the numbers of which change more often than her surname) from a Bobby Guinness whom she’s never met.

Laura receives a contract to track down money. She’s also contacted by Mari Emerine who’s suffering from cancer and accompanied by her teenaged daughter. She claims to be the real Bobby Guinness; Laura has been talking to a man fronting for her. Videotapes of the bodies of two women in the desert are shown on TV. U.S. Marshals and the U.S. Attorney pick Laura up and threaten her with old warrants unless she traces money that’s been sent to overseas banks.

The source of all these requests is illegal traffic in women, particularly from Eastern Europe. Promised a new identity and life in the United States, they’re smuggled in from Mexico but find themselves trapped in sexual slavery.

Sometimes assisted by her friend Meg, the owner of several secret houses for abused women, and by Rey, her occasional bodyguard, Laura tries to follow the murky threads that link the contracts even as one leads to her ex-husband. As she proceeds, the threats against her life will come from all sides.

Stalking Moon was my first Laura Winslow mystery, and that put me at a disadvantage. I confess I was often confused as to what was going on. The story assumes the reader is acquainted with Laura, her friends and colleagues, and her past exploits. If this weren’t enough, the various plot threads become very complicated. Rather than a climactic scene where Laura exposes all the villains and the whys and wherefores, I would have been more satisfied with an annotated flow chart that explained what had been going on for the previous 250-plus pages.

I learned from an ad page in the back of the volume that Laura is a cyber-sleuth. I’d gotten something of a hint in that direction in an early scene where Laura is surrounded by computers and several characters seem to believe she’s able to hack into bank computers worldwide to follow a money trail. The majority of the story, however, has Laura traveling by car, by truck, by motorcycle, by Humvee, even by horse (she’s often making deals for various vehicles which must all come with full tanks because in spite of all this gallivanting around, she never needs to pull in and fill up) all over southern Arizona and back and forth into Mexico just like a traditional private investigator rather than hunched over her computer keyboard. I’m somewhat familiar with this geographic region and usually was able to keep track of where Laura was at any point in the story, but a map with arrows detailing her movements might have been a welcome addition to the flow chart.

A weakness of Stalking Moon is its character development - or lack thereof. It’s written in the first person - which should allow the reader insight into narrator Laura Winslow’s character. I hesitate to make a blanket statement that male writers can’t write realistic female characters, but throughout the story, I never felt I was witnessing the action through the eyes of another woman. Perhaps the author decided that a female cyber-sleuth made for a more intriguing protagonist, but he forgot to make her female. It takes more than gender-specific underwear to make a female character.

Laura comes across as more of a placeholder than a flesh-and-blood woman. Two decades earlier her husband had stolen their young daughter and disappeared. Laura is supposed to have all these computer knowledge but doesn’t seem to have used her skills to track down her own child. When she finally meets up with her ex-husband, rather than attacking him physically or verbally she accepts his action philosophically. The dying Mari entrusts her teenage daughter to Laura; the girl disappears as a direct result of Laura’s activities. Oh, well, easy come easy go. I want more human compassion in my male characters than this, but - perhaps unfairly - I expect female characters to be especially protective of children. Laura’s reactions seem unnatural.

If you’ve read the previous two Laura Winslow books, you might be interested in this one, but I advise readers new to the series to proceed with caution.

--Lesley Dunlap