Sunday night he had spent reviewing his life, like a drowning man - Part One, from his childhood on a desperately poor South Dakota to his fancy scholarship education at Dartmouth and Princeton. Monday night he relived Part Two, a year in Paris, some romance and heartbreak, and the various reasons he had put his PhD dissertation on hold. Tonight he had been pondering Part Three, wondering what in the world had possessed him to move to the small New Mexico town of San Geronimo and take a job as a seeing-eye assistant to a blind ex-police commander from California.

His ruminations are cut short by a speeding truck that screeches to a halt at the restaurant dumpster. Something is tossed inside and the truck careens on, hitting Howie’s car and spinning it into a telephone pole before disappearing. Furious, Howie calls the police and AAA and then, with nothing to do but wait, looks inside the dumpster. He finds a human head in pretty bad shape. The earring dangling from one ear is what finally tips him off.

The head haunts Howie in his dreams and finding out that it has been cannibalized isn’t welcome news. Try as he might to forget about it, everything that happens next seems to be related. An archeologist is missing and another one, a young sultry Indian woman who Howie meets at a dinner party, intriguingly brings up cannibalism. Staring at her, Howie decides, “She was definitely a new breed of native, not your grandfather’s aborigine; yet the aura of the rez lingered about her in a tangible way . . . .” When the woman, DT, pays him a visit at home and asks him about the earring on the head, Howie tells her what he knows, all the while wondering how she knows about it since it has not been publicized.

Walking door to door with mug shots of missing cats, Howie finds himself asking people if they saw a speeding truck the other night. Someone has, and Howie is hot on the trail of a case he never wanted to investigate. The story adds dimensions of Indian folklore, wonderful scenery, and a refreshingly unsentimental take on the plight of the Native Americans.

The sassy, hip dialogue, and the portrayal of the tribe members as no different from the Mafia, to generalize, works and doesn’t work. It is really nice to get away from maudlin poor-me dissertations that often appear in fictional Native American books. On the other hand, the romance is definitely gone too.

Howie is a really likeable guy. The book is well written, often funny. But at the end Howie has not changed one little bit. This is unusual in a mystery and a little disconcerting, as if the supposedly thought-provoking events he’s been through never happened at all. Maybe it’s just his personality. I’ll have to read the other three books in the series to find out.

--Diane Gotfryd