Not believing him at first, Detective Caroline Mabry discards him as a lunatic, a nuisance, a bother. Clark soon convinces her, however, that there is more to his story than meets the eye. Under her consent, he proceeds to write his self-proclaimed confession for the next nineteen hours.

While Clark is busy penning his confession, Caroline is busy tracking down the tiny pieces of information she gleans from him. Slowly, she pieces together the story he is writing, his confession of how everything went wrong with his world.

But is he really a murderer? And if he is, whom did he murder?

Despite protests that usually an investigation starts with a body, not a killer, Clark is determined to convey his story to her in the best way he knows how: through the telling of his life story, and all the events leading up to the day he met Caroline.

Land of the Blind is an intriguing novel from start to finish, right down to its unusual chapter titles. Written unlike any other crime novel, its vivid descriptions and unusual twists keep the reader guessing. At times humorous and at times horrifying, this novel moves fluidly between the past and the present to tell a story unlike any other.

Caroline Mabry is a police detective in Spokane Washington who has been relegated to swing shift because she is burned out. Patrol officers bring in an apparent derelict caught breaking into the long-vacant Davenport Hotel who has told them he committed a murder. The one-eyed "loon" refuses to give either his name or the name of his victim, but says he will write out a confession for Caroline. Ensconced in an interview room, he starts filling page after page of a legal pad. We read segments of this confession (which begins in fifth grade) as it is written. Caroline has agreed to wait until it is finished, but cajoles from the confessee the name of one of the people who figure in the confession. Armed with that, she starts to unravel the story backwards from the present as the confession gradually unveils the past. Despite its static form, Walter keeps the story's suspense building right to the final page.

He does a marevlous job of showing the cruelties of childhood and adolescence played out in the poor Empire Road district, which is "pinched like an ant farm" against the Spokane River. The social landscape of Spokane and the cultural divide between it and Seattle are thoroughly explored. Even though a central character says "Spokane is Kmart and Seattle is Nordstrom", Walter's heart clearly belongs to Spokane. He jibes contemporary Seattle with, "We turned every gas station into a coffee shop, and by the time I left Seattle you could get four hundred flavors of coffee, but you couldn't find a decent gallon of gas".

In LAND OF THE BLIND the one-eyed man leads us over moral terrain where sins of commission and omission perpetrated by Jess Walter's characters may remind us uncomfortably of our own.

In 1979 Spokane, veteran Scott Moody is struggling with regaining control of his life. He has recently spent time in a mental institution and has quit his job as a private investigator. Instead, the former Nam grunt works on a newspaper and drives a cab. Though Scott hopes to one-day return to his ex-wife and child, he dates the beautiful heiress Xanthia Welch.

As he makes progress in straightening himself out, Moody has a setback, not of his making. He is the prime suspect in the stabbing murder of Xanthia's father, Andrew, an eminent businessman. Moody re-dons his sleuthing cap as he tries to prove his innocence by solving the murder in which he is the only witness.

Readers will forever know the type of who-done-it that stars Scott Moody. Like the debut tale (MOODY GETS THE BLUES), the second novel is a humorous, but convoluted satire of mysteries. Moody remains charming in a weird way and the support cast is a twisted crowd who add to the facetiousness even as they propel the story line forward. Though not for everyone, Steve Oliver has scribed a tale that will leaves fans of the offbeat mystery shouting MOODY FOREVER

Harriet Klausner

It's been said that there are two stories in the world: one, someone sets out on a journey, and two, a stranger knocks on the door. In "Reservation Blues", a stranger arrives on the Spokane Indian Reservation at the end of a long journey. The stranger turns out to be the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, who made a scant 29 recordings before dying of poison in 1938. In the novel, it turns out that Johnson faked his death in an attempt to escape the "Gentleman", an enigmatic figure that anyone familiar with the Robert Johnson mythos will recognize.

Johnson leaves his guitar in the back of storyteller Thomas Builds-the-Fire's van, which sends the plot rolling through themes of identity, alienation, tragedy and redemption. All of this, with a liberal sprinkling of the deft comic twist that is a hallmark of Alexie's style, and of the blues itself.

Being a musician, or any kind of artist, requires sacrifice--whether it's not getting enough sleep because you have to get up for your day job no matter how late you played the night before, or making a choice that results in losing something you care deeply about for the sake of your art. "Reservation Blues" shows how well Alexie understands this, and how even failure can be turned into success.

I first heard of this book in a review journal put out by a science fiction/fantasy bookstore, but Alexie integrates the fantastic elements of his story far more deftly than most writers of fantastic fiction can manage. Although the construction of the story is non-linear, Alexie never loses track of the threads of the tale, and the result is a great read that I've enjoyed over and over again.

The contents of the book, identified as "prose poems" by the subtitle, are a diverse lot - some nearly essays, some I would title sudden fiction, and a few I would identify as prose poems. Examples of the "prose poems" included in this book:

"Imposters Among the Ranks" is a delightful satire on a 1990 law requiring that "Indian" artists prove their native heritage.

"The Graverobbers and the Oldest Word" is a perceptive 'myth' of the clash between the Old Lexicon (based in nature and the recognition of the sacred in nature) and the New Lexicon of metallic beings. This with gentle humor exposes the emptiness of the dominate culture.

"The Argument of the Cynic" explores the issues surrounding assimilation.

Taken as a whole, the book explores the ethical questions arising from the history of colonial/native relationships - an exploration that recognizes the complexity and refuses to be lulled into simple answers. Most typical of the content, but not necessarily the style, is this quote from "The Argument of the Cynic" - "From the moment they are born, our offspring inherit the legacy of unwritten history, unprocessed grief. In this world, there is no rest for the cynic in whose skeptical glance definitive assurance is the highest form of fiction."

Salt Dancers focuses on various themes often discussed today which in the able hands of Ms. Hegi become painfully fresh and new. Themes such as forgiveness, emotional and physical abuse, abandonment, closure and finally moving on.

Although Hegi is best known for her book Stones from the River, I have found all of her titles compelling, especially this one.

In Murder in Spokane, you think the same situation is going to happen. Then you realize about halfway through the story that he isn't analyzing clues at all, but is focusing on his personal experiences with the police denying him information. Overall, this book is much more self-centered than Murder in Greenwich. Fuhrman simply doesn't have access to real clues in the Spokane situation, he is totally out of the loop and not involved in the investigation. Unlike Murder in Greenwich, where he was doing a real investigation from start to finish.

I do not recommend this book. It is about Mark Fuhrman's personal experiences when the murders were happening, not about the murders themselves. Fuhrman also has nothing to do with finding the killer, unlike his previous books. There is also almost no detail about the murders or crime scenes. One would expect details, but since Fuhrman can't gain access to the police files, there are no details. You would think at some point he could file a FOA request for info, but he doesn't. He also doesn't point out that the first murder victim was wrapped in an Army blanket, and that the murderer turned out to be in the Army. I thought this was an important correlation.

Oh well. Maybe the with next book Fuhrman will get closer to the case, instead of sitting on the sideline like in this one.

As a regular listener to Mark's radio talk show, this book was especially interesting to me. I remember how many times Mark Fuhrman and Mike Fitzsimmons offered help to the task force. Several callers gave tips to the radio show which were turned over to the task force, yet many weeks later, had not been followed up on.

I recommend this book to everyone.