A Hummingbird Dance.

Lisa Arsenault is a high-school English teacher who is involved in
several ministry campaigns to increase literacy.

This is the third novel in the police series featuring detectives Lane and Harper. Set in Alberta with the Calgary Stampede as part of the backdrop, much of the action occurs on disputed First Nations tribal land. Alex, a 17-year-old boy, had been intentionally murdered in a highway incident a couple of years previously, and on the subsequent anniversaries of his death two more young men were killed. It appeared that everyone knew who had committed the first murder, they just couldn’t prove it, but the others were a mystery.

Lane and Harper use their strong connections with the community, sympathetic sensibilities, ability to mediate between feuding neighbours, and specialized knowledge to extract information where others couldn’t to flush out the first murderer and apprehend the perpetrator of the second two murders.

Social commentary, particularly on the vagaries of family life, is a linchpin of this novel. A majority of the people involved are gay and have issues associated with that. Both detectives have “throw away” teenagers, the author’s term for abandoned/thrown out of their homes kids, living with them. They have issues. Lane acquires in the course of the novel a runaway niece from Paradise, the patriarchal, polygamous society that refuses education and self-determination to girls: naturally she has issues. The original murder victim was deaf, gay, and Aboriginal. He had issues. The ongoing dynamics involved with reconciling all of these issues is at least as important to the author as resolving the murders. A dollop of political commentary on the relationships between racial groups and disputed land ownership is also included. As a result, a certain amount of navel-gazing is to be expected. However, the author takes it one step further by having Alex more or less come back to life in the form of a marionette and communicate with his puppeteer (who also has issues). Needless to say, this is not a conventional murder mystery.