Ravenmocker

This is the first in the Molly Bearpaw series by Oklahoma author Jean Hager (who actually lives up the street from me!) I actually read most of the series and the Mitch Bushyhead series thirty or so years ago. Obviously, I have forgotten the details in that time. I remember these books as wonderful, cozy mysteries. I was right!

In Ravenmocker, Molly, who works for the Cherokee nation, investigates mysterious nursing home deaths. There's a touch of romance with the mystery, and the reader learns some interesting facts about the Cherokee and their culture. The mystery has a satisfying resolution that I didn't figure out half way through the novel. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Boring. This is a book I'll dump on some unsuspecting library book sale soon. The female sleuth recovering from a bad relationship and renting from an active elderly man sounds a lot like Grafton's Kinsey Millhone. Molly Bearpaw suffers by comparison.
Rather than show us Molly's intelligent thought processes, we are treated to paragraph after paragraph of Molly pacing the floor or reading her notes once again, trying to think of what she's missing. At one point she wonders "if Perrone was much more than a friend..."(p. 195) and 2 pages later without having done any research to check this she is declaring "Obviously your brother...". Molly asks suspects about their relatives life insurance policies, then thinks that their angry reaction show more is a sure sign of guilt.
Hager has a skewed idea of what nurses learn, assuming that they would know about companies who culture botulism bacilli (p. 165). Nurses don't have spare time for running their own science experiments, and even if they studied bacteria in school, all supplies were purchased by the school not themselves.
Molly collects a water sample in a rinsed jelly jar. Where I come from, the lab provides sealed containers so no contaminants get in the sample from a source other than the water supply. show less

This wasn't, to me, a very interesting book and was a disappointment as I had been looking forward to reading it. A bit formulaic, neither the characters or the mystery grabbed my interest. I may read the next book in the series to see if things improve.