Fire Dancer

Money, murder and inheritance fill the air in Fire Dancer by Susan Slater. Ben Pecos and his fiancee Julie Conlin are invited by a friend to stay at her palatial home in New Mexico.

Connie CdeBaca is the head of a family of successful land developers, but she harbors a deep secret she has never told anyone. She is also terminally ill with leukemia and has made arrangements for her estate that will profoundly impact her three step children. There is no love loss between the adult children and Connie, but because of an error in a survey a hundred years ago, the land she is trying to develop should really be part of the Sandia Pueblo.  She wants to give the land back to them instead of developing it into mega-homes.

Naturally this does not go over well with the step children. Greedy, angry and willing to do anything to stop Connie, they plot to gain control.

Meanwhile in his job as a psychologist at the Indian Health

Services in Albuquerque, Ben has been treating a person with gender identity issues. Em is a young Indian, born male, but trying to identify as a female. His identify issues arose after he was given up for adoption as a baby and raised by a Mormon couple. His adopted mother let him cross dress but his adoptive father was against it. With both of them dead, he from illness and she being murdered, he sets out to find his Indian roots.

When a murder takes place, we learn some of the secrets being hidden. Fire Dancer is a suspenseful, exciting mystery that will keep you guessing until the very end. 

A Way to the Manger

Christmas time in New Mexico is filled with tradition - both Tewa Pueblo and Christian. But this Christmas there's a dark foreboding when star basketball player Charlene Toya goes missing. In A Way to the Manger by Susan Slater, psychologist Ben Pecos has some unusual help in his search for Charlene.

Charlene is the star basketball player on the high school team with a goal of getting a full scholarship to the University of New Mexico, but something is standing in her way. She is eight months pregnant and has managed to hide this from everyone.

After the game Charlene heads to a building she hopes will have someone to help her with her pregnancy. Not an abortion, but with the adoption of the baby. She slips a note into the letter box asking someone to call her on a pay phone in the recreational center the next day.  As she turns to walk away, a woman answers the door and encourages her to come into the agency.

When the woman discovers Charlene is Native American, she tells her the child is shielded by law from adoption outside the reservation. With a sinking heart, Charlene flees to her truck and into a dangerous situation.

After Charlene has been missing for several days, Ben enlists the assistance of several members of the pueblo to find her. No one believes Charlene ran away, she had too much going for her. Most feel something terrible has happened to her. 

And something terrible has happened to Charlene but she uses her strength and resolve to find a way out of her situation.  An unlikely hero is Lorenzo Loretto, 96-year-old village hero.

A Way to the Manger is a Christmas novella in the Ben Pecos Mystery series. I look forward to getting to know Ben Pecos and the Tewa Pueblo better in the other books.