Moonshadows

The search has been long and arduous, but I have finally found a mystery set in Idaho. Julie Weston's Moonshadows features Nellie Burns, a young photographer who heads west to find adventure and establish her career. She stops in Ketchum, Idaho, to photograph moonshadows on the snow.

She convinces a local to drive her out into the countryside so she can scout locations. They pass an abandoned cabin called the Last Chance Ranch. Rosy, her driver, says a family lived there - wife, husband and two boys. Wife died, boys went East and husband drank himself to death. Nellie feels a chill as she listens to the story.

The next night Rosy brings her back near the cabin after a heavy snowfall and says he will wait in the car until she is finished. Equipped with snowshoes and a sled to tow her equipment, Nellie sets out to capture the full moon on the snow. As she completes her photos, she hears tapping at the cabin. Trying to reach the cabin, one of her snowshoe straps breaks and she decides to stay in the cabin overnight. As she opens the door, a dog leaps up to greet her and she spots a dead man on the floor, his face a mask of ice with an axe in his hand. She hears Rosy say he will be back for her in the morning, so there is nothing she can do but try to warm up the cabin.

As a photographer in Chicago, Nellie was used to taking photographs of dead people, so she decides,

she will arrange the body to take some pictures of him. (I know a little bizarre, but it works for her.)

When she awakens the next morning, the body is gone. She knows she didn't dream it because the dog, Moonshine, is still there. When Rosy and the sheriff arrive the next morning, they aren't quite sure she is telling the truth about a body.

As Rosie processes her photos in the bathroom of the boarding house, she discovers they do capture the body on the floor. Hiding the negatives in her room until she is able to show them to the sheriff, she investigate on her own, and heads back to the Last Chance. When she discovers another body buried in hard packed snow, she gets caught in the middle of danger. Plus her negatives proving she had seen a body have been stolen from her room.

A missing Chinese doctor, a Basque sheriff, another missing body and the irate family of the doctor lead Nellie on a suspenseful adventure towards finding the solution.

I enjoyed this book (more for the story than for the capture of Idaho for my map) because of the challenges Nellie overcomes. Life for women in the 1920s was difficult, especially for single women. Author Julie Weston understands their plight and captures it beautifully.