SKY WOMAN FALLING

Native American myth, Oneida land claims, and psychosis complicate the latest case of Indian Affairs specialists Emmett Parker and Anna Turnipseed (Ancient Ones, 2001, etc.).

How could Brenda Two Kettles have been thrown off Adirondack flight 557 en route to New York from Syracuse without anyone noticing? Is it possible she wasn’t on the plane but was tossed through a hole in the ether, like the Sky Woman of myth? Maybe, but FBI agents Parker (Comanche) and Turnipseed (Modoc) also zero in on Garrity, a plane mechanic and member of the Upstate Minutemen, who violently resented the land claims that would entitle the Oneida to billions in reparations. Christopher White Pine, an author, therapist, and special assistant to the Oneida Nations representative, has his own ideas, and so do the higher-ups at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau, the local cops, airlines security and maintenance personnel, Two Kettles’s relatives, and even Johnny T. Skyholder, the slow-witted, behemoth handyman at the Cultural Center. Several more bodies crash to earth; planes almost taxi into Parker; and an axe-wielding baddie lays him low. Turnipseed drives all over the ice-and-snow landscape in pursuit of divers suspects, ultimately falling through the air herself when a killer tries to turn her into Sky Woman.

An awful lot of crucial information depends on hypnosis and Turnipseed’s dreams. In addition, there’s numbing aeronautic detail, some grisly death sequences, and a rather touching ending to the Parker-Turnipseed romance.