The Stolen Gods

I picked up "Stolen Gods" and "Deadly Canyon" off the Plaza in Santa Fe. So intrigued with the "Gods" opening chapters that I bought two other T. Moore Bowdre books: "The Lethal Partner" and "The Knotted Strings" off the Plaza in Old Town in Albuquerque a day later. "Gods" was a quick read with too many characters, I initially thought, but they all came together like pieces of a puzzle at the end (which, of course, a mystery tale is). Chapters which I thought were simply Jake Page's excuse to show off his knowledge of Native American life and the regional geography actually offered clues to the murderer and insight to a character's motivation for his actions. I am looking forward to reading the other three Jake Page/Mo Bowdre books I purchased during my vacation to New Mexico. I often found myself saying as I was reading "I saw that," "I went there." Also, I believe that the Mo Bowdre gallery described in the book could be an actual gallery across the street from the Loretto Chapel - which is home to the mysterious staircase that makes two 360-degree turns, reaches 20 feet to the choir loft and was originally constructed in the late 1800s without a center support nor a single nail. Today's architects and engineers are dumbfounded. Anyhow, the gallery sits on the corner with towering sculptures of bears, eagles, deer and other Southwestern creations.

Unlike Tony Hillerman, Page presents a modern detective story based on very genuine Native American issues without pretending to portray the habits and thoughts of Indian police officers. In so doing, he's come up with a good story. Page is astute enough to recognize the three of the four distinct cultures of New Mexico -- Native American, Spanish and Anglo (he ignores the Mexicans) -- which co-exist in sometimes uneasy tension but rarely overlap. He is masterful in depicting the pretentious twittery of Santa Fe, mostly an Anglo veneer over the Spanish poverty which existed until the Santa Fe - Taos axis of a "friendly, familiar, foreign and close" culture was discovered by Anglo artists and wealthy tourists after the arrival of the Santa Fe railway in the 1880s. His story also covers the Hopi Rez, and briefly the Tucson area -- I've lived in this region for 35 years. His descriptions of people and placing are authentic, he offers a charming but unvarnished authenticity. Strangely, he keeps referring to Interstate highways as "Route 40" instead of the more familiar "I-40" -- but, that's a minor quibble. He avoids the "Drunktown" description of Gallup, the self-proclaimed "Indian Capital of the World," calling it the "Degradation Capital of the Indian World" which is well-deserved. But the emphasis is solving a murder, linked to the theft of sacred Indian icons, by an Anglo law enforcement officer. There are plenty of villains, including an archaeologist, a conniving Spanish woman, a fading member of Santa Fe's cultural elite, a former Bureau of Indian Affairs teacher and an alcoholic Hopi youth. In this plot, he nicely sums up the inter-twined villainy that produces the trade in looted archaeological and religious gems. In this case, it was Hopi religious items. He could just as easily have written about the theft of ancient Spanish "santos" from abandoned churches; it's not just thousand-year-old items that form this lucrative trade, it's almost anything left unguarded in the vastness of the mostly empty New Mexico rural landscape. There is a bitter truth to the saying that Southwestern ranchers "would steal a hot stove, then come back for the smoke." Santos ? I personally know of an entire abandoned church that was stolen. Page's villains are the usual range of exploiters and opportunists, and he deals in a straight forward fashion with theft and repatriation of Native American artifacts without getting bogged down in contentious debates or moralizing. It's a real issue, as sensitive to Native Americans as would be the case of a Catholic priest stealing holy objects from Vatican altars to finance his weaknesses and sins. How real is it ? How about a police officer who alledgedly killed a Native American jewelry buyer and used the proceeds to open a business ? Or an archaeologist "given" a small fortune in ancient pots from various digs ? Proof ? Sometimes, it's almost impossible. Page's strong point is that he writes