HOUR OF THE HUNTER

A hodgepodge hardcover debut in which two Native American medicine men, an Arizona lawman, a young widow and her son, and a Papago basket-weaver/wise woman are inexorably drawn into confrontation with the evil ohb, a university professor-turned-serial-killer, who upended their lives six years before when he tortured and murdered the basket-weaver's granddaughter and then stage-managed a suicide/flame-up for his distraught accomplice Garrison Ladd. Now he's stalking Ladd's widow Diana and son Davy, but his old MO (biting off nipples) used on a new victim has set the sheriff's department on his trail, while his malevolent spirit has energized the Papagos. There will be another murder, an attempted murder, dreams, emanations, and a near-fatal dog-poisoning before everyone converges on the Ladd house for a gruesome resolution. Disconcerting time shifts and a plethora of Papago parables (can anyone outdo Tony Hillerman?) fail to disguise the fact that this is nothing more than potboiler melodrama, with the hapless reader bombarded first by the lurid, then by the mystical.