Desert Cut

All the books in Betty Webb's Desert series featuring PI Lena Jones have been very good. They are tied together by the mystery of Jones' background and her developing personal relationships, while each has an individual theme in the mystery Jones is focused on solving. This one has a theme that is not for the squeamish. That does not make it less important as a social issue. If the series has any drawback, it would lie in the often thinly veiled hostility towards government-employed law enforcement personnel.

I just finished Dessert Cut by Betty Webb it's her fifth Lena Jones Mystery - Lena is a Scottsdale Az. PI who has survived a gunshot to the head when she was a small girl and raised in the "system". This foray involved female genitalia mutilation, which used to be common in the Middle East (which I didn't know), and her fight to solve a little girls murder. If you haven't read her it will be worth your while to do so, she takes on a lot of today's socially conscious issues.

"I'm not a nice girl," Lena Jones declares on the first page of the first book (Desert Wives) in this outstanding mystery series by Betty Webb, built around controversial darkside themes. By the time Desert Cut, Lena's fifth dilemma comes along, she still isn't. And it's a good thing. Lena is a been-there woman. She needs all the experience she has as an ex-cop and now Scottsdale PI. One perfect morning she and her colleague/companion Warren Quinn are enjoying a pleasant ride across the Arizona desert when they make a stunning and horrifying discovery--the body of a girl-child. Is she the victim of an illegal border crossing gone wrong, or more, or worse? Once again former investigative reporter Betty Webb shows her skills in spinning a fascinating story around a tough topic. Webb is a fine place-writer. Her descriptions of the desert landscape and the people shaped by it alone recommend the book. But the culture is changing. There are more than the relationships between the Native American, the Anglos and the Hispanics. There is yet another wave of newcomers as burgeoning job opportunities attract workers from halfway around the world. Herein lays the conflict. For the lovely child, the dead girl, was not abandoned after an accidental death, but is the victim of a brutal and unspeakable crime. So unspeakable that local sheriff refuses to give Lena the cause of death--for a time. Lena is persistent not only in gaining that knowledge but in pursuing the truth until all is understood. In the process, Lena learns more about herself and discovers more about her own tangled background. The book is not all heavy going. There are flashes of the glitzy world of Beverly Hills when Lena flies over to her consulting job on a television Western, and as we learn of Warren's day job as an Oscar-winning Hollywood director. Plenty of humor sparks out as well. Still, Webb reveals, as is sometimes best done in fiction, some eye-opening facts about this nameless crime. And she names it--female genital mutilation or amputation. Terrifying yes, but something every person needs to know of and understand in our changing culture. Webb ends the book with two appendices (one with explicit language) and a bibliography on the subject. She's serious about this. I recommend this book, both for the quality of the story and for the essential and painful information, but the reader should not pick it up unaware. by Patricia Nordyke Pando for Story Circle Book Reviews reviewing books by, for, and about women

Reviewed by Anita D. McClellan for Reader Views (10/07) The fifth Lena Jones Mystery finds ex-cop and PI Lena scouting Arizona's Mexican border for Geronimo's 19th-century battle sites with LA-LA-Land film director Warren Quinn, her problematic and erstwhile lover, and leads Lena to discovery of the mutilated corpse of an unidentified girl between ages 5 and 7, nicknamed Precious Doe by the Cochise County medical examiner. Lena, who takes all instances of abused children personally, stumbles right into the local population of H-visa'ed, upper-middle class, foreign-born parents and their US-born and -raised daughters with a foot in two cultures. A teen runaway's sheltering of a youngster from Old World and New World sect-driven practices helps to drive a deadly social, hierarchal rite deeply underground, pits daughters against parents, descendents of pioneers who fought the Apache Wars against immigrant plant managers, and makes strange bedfellows of an Anglo Christian women's sect and Middle Eastern and African parents determined to manage "their" women and girls as they see fit. The bodies of children pile up in Los Perdidos while Lena becomes obsessed with finding out what is going on in the wilderness desert country in spite of vigilante justice and the local sheriff, who has no clue what he and the community are dealing with but knows all about what makes Lena so determined to learn the truth. The Author's Note and Appendixes of "Desert Cut" make this novel's subject something no reader will forget and on which none can claim ignorance. As the product of nine abusive foster homes who was found amnesic at age four on a Phoenix street severely disfigured from a shooting, Lena Jones is perennially seeking information about her parents and her abandonment's circumstances. Her Pima Indian, computer-geek partner, Jimmy Sisiwan, also orphaned as a child but adopted and raised by white parents, has his own obsessions and vulnerabilities, which make them ideal business partners and confidantes. Pieces of Lena's past emerge as the series unfolds. In the second book, she learns something about her mother; in the third, she learns about her father; in the fourth, she figures out why she is so drawn to certain kinds of cases. "Desert Noir" (2001) launched the Lena Jones series, juxtaposing Scottsdale's up-market art scene with barrios, Indian lands and casinos, tourist traps. That heady brew of damaged and courageous PI, the Southwest's multi-tiered cultures, and breath-taking desert backdrop took a seat right away next to Nevada Barr's and Tony Hillerman's series. Ten percent of Webb's debut novel proceeds were donated to Lura Turner Homes, a Phoenix residence for brain-damaged adults and children and teens with Down's Syndrome which signaled exactly what sets Betty Webb's novels apart: crime fiction with a social conscience. Lena Jones Mysteries are based on stories the author covered as a journalist and are set against the backdrop of Arizona'

Author Julia Spencer-Fleming calls DESERT CUT harrowing and thought-provoking...spiked with social outrage...a book that will remain with you a long time. Author David Morrell says people will talk about if for a long time to come. I could not agree more. This book does what the best crime fiction can do; it entertains, enlightens and educates. The subject matter is as current as the immigration issues. And all who read it will have cause to reflect upon what it means to be an American in this day and age. This book will surely attract awards attention! Betty Webb's blend of fine writing and investigative journalism just gets better with each book. And DESERT CUT is a book I will remember well 20 years from now.