Ill Winds Blow No Good



Desert Wind [by] Betty Webb

[Scottsdale, AZ] Poisoned Pen Press [2012]

978-1-59058-979-3; $24.95

Lena Jones goes to work at Desert Investigations, the P.I. firm she has built with her Pima Indian partner, Jimmy Sisiwan, in Scottsdale, AZ, only to find that Jimmy isn’t there, and nobody is telling her where he is, or why he’s gone there.  Although Lena isn’t as good searching the internet as Jimmy is, her minimal skills root out the fact that Jimmy’s adopted brother, Ted Olmstead, has been arrested in the shooting death of Ike Donohue in the remote northern Arizona town of Walapai Flats.  Then, she discovers that Jimmy has also been arrested.  Lena packs up her Trailblazer and heads on out.

She discovers that the whole town is up-in-arms.  Some are upset about the opening of a new uranium mine, just 10 miles from the Grand Canyon, to be run by a man who has already severely injured one Indian tribe with his negligent practices at another uranium mine on the Navajo Reservation.  In fact, Ted Olmstead’s wife, the head of Victims of Uranium Mining (V.U.M.) has already been mysteriously killed some months before for her political activism against the mine.  Curiously enough, the P.R. director for the mine is the man who has been killed.  There are folks who think that Donohue’s death was mighty well deserved. Others are angry, because they see the mine as a source of badly-needed jobs and a boost to the economy of the area, which is built primarily on tourism – after all, movies were made there, a cash cow they don’t want to see run away because of the shootings, rallies, and other negative things happening in town.

Jimmy and his proud adopted family are not happy that Lena has come to help, but they accept her help, because there doesn’t seem to be another way.   She meets most of the important people in town and at the rich enclave that has been built up around an artificial oasis by developers and others in Donohue’s social set.  She makes friends with Donohue’s widow and with an Eastern journalist.  She also interviews members of Jimmy’s family and other natives of the area.  She has a run-in with a deputy sheriff, whom she suspects of beating his wife.  Lena calls him “Deputy Smiley Face.

Soon it looks like Lena’s questions are hitting close to someone, because someone takes shots at her when she is out in the desert.  And shots ring out for others, too.  The new owner-manager of the Mine is killed, as is Deputy Smiley Face.  But the linchpin that seems to hold everything together, and who may have the answers that Lena seeks, is old Gabe Boone, a wrangler who worked on the 1954 filming of one of John Wayne’s worst movies, “The Conqueror,” in which the Duke played Genghis Khan.  If she can penetrate his defenses, she may find out the tragic secret that everyone in Walapai Flats is unwilling to talk about.

Betty Webb has a background as a journalist, and her Desert Series opens her readers’ eyes to many secrets that the desert holds.  The quotation that opens this book is from William Faulkner:  “The past is never dead.  It is not even past.”  This proves to be quite true, as she delves into the sad stories of the people of the region, both famous and not, both fictional and real.  Historical notes and a bibliography are appended.

But this is not just a book with an ax to grind.  It is also a very deep story of love and relationships, heroism in small ways, and the ways that attitudes like “the only people there are farmers and Indians” can betray humanity both in the past and in the years to come.  The descriptions of the beauty of the desert and the ravages of its “civilizing” are wonderful, the plotting is superb (the criminal is a big surprise), and the characters, even the minor ones are top notch.  Highly recommended. ~ lss-r

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This book is mine.