Queen of the Night
Jul. 30th, 2023 06:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cornerofmadness posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
bookheaven
Queen of the Night: A Novel of Suspense by J.A. JanceMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This one was one of those I didn't know was four books into a series but I didn't feel too lost. It was written as a tribute to Tony Hillerman (with the Native American connection you'd expect). It put me in mind of Columbo in that you know who did it and it's more about how the detectives do their thing.
It was also one I came close to DNFing. It's a very slow starter but that wasn't my issue Each chapter is long and multiple point of views per chapter, each one well marked with who, where, when and even temperature (why I don't know. I kept expecting temperature to play a role as a result but it never did). In the beginning there were about 8 different points of view to get through (less after the murders)
The title refers to a night blooming cactus that blooms one night a year giving us both the festival view of it and the Indigenous people's view of the same. We have the Walker family including their adopted Native daughter, Lani who is a doctor and his mentee Dan Pardee, also Native (but Apache who were the historic enemies of the local group which much is made of in this) who is fresh from Iraq and now working with an all Indigenous branch of border patrol.
Before long we have a violently orphaned Native girl that Dan and Lani have to help and keep safe while the detectives try to find who killed four people, the person this four year old witnessed fleeing the crime scene that took her mom.
Once we get to the murder the story moves much quicker with a lot of personal side jaunts, some of which are a little annoying (like Lani's mom who thinks she's got dementia with zero testing and basically self diagnosing and plans to die instead of you know asking her doctor daughter who knows instantly what it actually is). I was also a little creeped out with the insta-love, insta-marriage ending but that's me.
It was overall not bad and I might even read others in this series but I'm not sure.
View all my reviews
