EXPOSURE

A pair of antagonists with eerily complementary vocations square off against each other.

Rita Todacheene, a Navajo photo specialist for the Albuquerque crime lab, not only sees dead people but hears them too, and they have plenty to say. Margarita Montaño, one of six children shot to death along with their parents, tells Rita that even though her surviving brother, Jude, has been in police custody ever since he walked into the First Desert Light Church with an empty revolver, he didn’t murder his family: “It was Daddy.” But although Steven Montaño left behind photographic evidence that he abused all three of his daughters, he was a retired Albuquerque PD detective, and the blue wall closes around him. Since no one credits Rita’s secondhand testimony—which, granted, does sound a little far-fetched—and the cops insist that she keep her ideas to herself, she quits her job, leaving herself unmoored and adrift. In the meantime, Brother Gabriel Jensen, who’s moved by an equally strong passion to help the street people of nearby Gallup by setting them free of their mortal coils, graduates to murdering former Gallup mayor Emmitt Gurley, whose ghost threatens Rita with serious harm if she doesn’t bring his killer, whom he declines to identify, to justice. The high-profile deaths that follow lead Det. Arviso to ask Rita for help. Rita, who can’t turn down another Navajo, takes up the gauntlet, setting the stage for a final battle with an adversary who also hears voices and acts on them even more decisively than she does.

Less a mystery than a compelling, interlocked portrait of two troubled souls.