McGraw-Hill: Spelling by Gabrielson Terry R

McGraw-Hill: Spelling by Gabrielson Terry R

The incomparable mysteries of James D. Doss, featuring the amiable, outsized Ute tribal policeman Charlie Moon and his irascible shaman aunt Daisy Perika, are brilliantly conceived, richly atmospheric puzzles generously sprinkled with humor and Native American mysticism, and teeming with characters as colorful and memorable as any found in contemporary fiction. The enchantment is more potent than ever before in this spellbinding tale of lethal human depravity and a legendary nightmare come alive.

A lawman with a hardy appetite for life and an unshakable faith in the explicable and rational, Charlie Moon has never taken his grumpy aunt Daisy's visions and premonitions seriously. He is especially skeptical of the old woman's stories about Grandmother Spider, a gargantuan avenging arachnid that allegedly rises up out of Navajo Lake in search of human prey. But on April first, in the still, utter darkness of the Colorado night, Daisy and her young ward, Sarah, see something striding across the Canon del Espiritu. And something carries off Tommy Tonompicket and his unlikely drinking companion, research scientist William Pizinski, that same night, after ripping the hood off of Tommy's truck. And then there's the mangled, headless corpse lying outside a cabin in the mountains, with two large, fanglike punctures in its chest .

Charlie is not prepared to accept a purely supernatural explanation for the recent occurrences.

This is murder, in Moon's opinion, pure if not simple -- and by human hands, most probably.

Even Charlie's friend, matukach Police Chief Scott Parris-who is more willing than most white men to see the things that hover beyond the edge of this world -- does not yet subscribe to the mythical monster on the loose theory that the evidence seems to overwhelmingly suggest. For there are just too many loose threads in this twisted web of blood and secrets, too many lies being spun and sticky pasts being protected -- and soon another death all of which strongly suggest that the dreaded Kagu-ci Mukwa-pi does not, in fact, exist.

But then again . The most audaciously original and continually surprising of his critically acclaimed novels, Grandmother Spider confirms James D. Doss as a true master of the mystical, the hilarious, and the mysterious.