Shadows of Death by David Sundstrand

First Line: This time the dead animals were in human form.

Seth Parker is a self-appointed vigilante. If he catches a person showing cruelty to an animal, that person will pay dearly.  How dearly? Here are three examples:

A man who cut the beaks off pelicans for stealing his fish was found dead and lipless. The owner of a dog fighting ring is found torn to pieces by his own dogs. Two teenage boys who posted a YouTube video showing themselves blowing up cats are missing, and no one expects to find either of them in one piece. This is the sort of work that Seth Parker has become known for, and that's the reason why he's wanted by the FBI.

Frank Flynn is a law enforcement agent for the Bureau of Land Management. As a person who loves the Mojave Desert and the wildlife that can be found there, he has to admit that he sympathizes more with Parker than he should. Flynn reads about what Parker's been doing until Parker moves into the Mojave and kills two poachers for using wild burros as target practice. Now he's on Flynn's turf, and although Flynn seems able to guess Parker's next moves, he can't seem to get ahead of the killer.

Flynn would rather take a beating than provide any sort of protection at the opening of Sand Canyon, an exclusive hunting resort where the well-heeled can use the latest firepower to kill sedated big cats and other wild game, but that's exactly what he's assigned to do. He knows Parker's going to be there with plans to take down as many people as he can. Now all Flynn has to do is stay alive long enough to bring Parker to justice.

If you're a reader who respects the environment and loves wildlife, you can't go wrong by picking up either of David Sundstrand's Desert Sky mysteries, Shadow of the Raven and Shadows of Death. These two books are filled with beautiful descriptions of the desert and its plants and wild creatures.  Frank Flynn has the perfect assignment: protecting the land and the animals that he loves so much, but it's not easy...

"This is where I grew up, and I'm watching it start to die. You know what that's like? People come up here, tear up the land, dump trash, go home, and water their lawns-- with our water." He turned to Linda. "They bring their guns and act like the valley's a shooting gallery. Shoot at anything that moves."

Although he likes and admires his boss and has a good relationship with his girlfriend Linda, he can be very abrasive with people who treat the environment as their own private garbage dump and playground. After dealing with those types, the best thing he can do is spend time in his converted railroad caboose out in a remote corner of the desert.

Sundstrand does an excellent job of portraying the landscape in all its unforgiving beauty and frailty. He also shines a spotlight on a fact that few people give much thought to-- that many areas in the desert Southwest have had their water taken from them so that people in large metropolitan areas like Los Angeles and Phoenix can have their green lawns and swimming pools.

But as good as the writing is about the landscape, it's just as good when it comes to the plot and to how the story unfolds. Frank is dealing with a brilliant, deranged killer on the one hand, and with uncooperative colleagues on the other. When he and Seth Parker meet at Sand Canyon, the action is fast, furious, and bad for the blood pressure-- but oh so good to the last page.

Both books in the Desert Sky series stand alone well, but I recommend reading them both... for the character of Frank Flynn and for the evocative picture Sundstrand paints of the Mojave Desert.

Shadows of Death by David Sundstrand

ISBN: 9781250005427

Minotaur Books © 2009

Paperback, 336 pages

Genre: Environmental Mystery, #2 Desert Sky mystery

Rating: A

Source: Paperback Swap

Scene of the Crime with Author David Sundstrand!

Last year, I read a mystery set in the Mojave Desert (Shadow of the Raven), and not only did reading it make me want to get my hands on the other book in the series, it made me want to get to know more about the author. David Sundstrand has written two exceptional books that I call "environmental" mysteries because the setting itself plays such an important role. Having gone out on some extremely rough trails in the Arizona portion of the Mojave, I loved being able to read mysteries which are set there and written by someone who knows the area so well.

David Sundstrand

Tomorrow you'll be able to stop by and read my review of the second Desert Sky mystery, Shadows of Death, but before we get to today's interview, I thought I'd share a few links so you can learn more about this talented writer.

David Sundstrand's website

David Sundstrand on Facebook

David Sundstrand's books

What was the very first book you remember reading and loving? What makes that book so special?

The Story of Ferdinand, written by Munro Leaf and illustrated by Robert Lawson.  

It’s a wonderful story of a peaceful soul and the discovery of courage, but the memory that comes flooding back to me is Robert Lawson’s illustration of Ferdinand sitting under his favorite cork tree with perfectly shaped corks dangling from the branches. 

Outside of your writing and all associated commitments, what do you like to do in your free time? 

Ferdinand and I came into being in 1935, so I find myself wandering in and out of the past, the temporal borders less and less distinct.  The same may be said for the separation between the material world I presently inhabit and the fictional world of my creation, which seems more tangible with the passage of each day.  Okay, I like spending time in the Mojave Desert and cheap bars.

If I were to visit your hometown, where would you recommend that I go? (I like seeing and doing things that aren't in all the guidebooks.)

Truckee River in Reno, Nevada

My hometown is Pasadena, California.  I live in Reno, Nevada, so let’s deal with Reno.  I’d recommend a bike ride along the Truckee River that meanders through Reno and Sparks.  This would be especially good amidst the fall colors of the cottonwoods.  Walter Van Tilburg Clark entitled his autobiography The City of Trembling Leaves, a particularly lovely and apt title, like his writing.

You have total control over casting a movie based on your life. Which actor would you cast as you?

Robert Shaw in "Jaws"

Ah well, Robert Shaw comes to mind, just the right touch of suppressed menace.  I believe many of my former students would second the selection.  Oh yes, I know he’s dead, but total control is total control.  Hubris is the best thing about writing.  It’s the author’s world, where one can reward the just, punish the malignant and mock the fools—and resurrect the dead for just the right part.

Who is your favorite recurring character in crime fiction?

Fat Ollie Weeks is a wonder.  He is a tribute to the craft of Ed McBain, a pen name for the late Evan Hunter.  Fat Ollie is an ignorant (but not dumb), bigoted and successful detective in McBain’s later 87th Precinct novels.  McBain gets the reader to care for this walking pariah, an absolutely astonishing tour de force.  I think McBain fell under the spell of his creation.  Near the end of his career he wrote Fat Ollie’s Book.  I won’t summarize other than to say that Fat Ollie turns author, hence a double-entendre in the title.  It’s a must read for any writer of detective fiction.  A masterpiece of craft and compassion. 

Name one book that you've read that you wish you had written. What is it about that book that made it come to mind?

It appears I have passed through this door.  What more to say about Fat Ollie’s Book except that as we glimpse Fat Ollie’s foray into fiction, we observe the master craftsman at work interconnecting Fat Ollie’s dreadful prose following the adventures of Olivia Weeks (Ollie’s fictional stand-in) into the central story.   McBain interweaves structure and theme so effortlessly the book appears to have written itself.

How did you celebrate when you first heard you were to be published? What did you do the first time you saw one of your books on a shelf in a bookstore?

I took my wife to dinner because she had suffered through the five years of flaming enthusiasm and confidence into the sorry depths of despair, only to lift me up with a much more level-headed appreciation of the process.  Who can one share these moments with but someone close to the heart?

My first encounter with my book in a bookstore took place in Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena.  I asked a clerk to look up the novel for me, and then I stood before it, breathed deeply, took it from the shelf, pretended to browse the contents and carefully reshelved it.  The moment was every bit as satisfying as I had imagined.  

I don't know if you've seen it, but I love Parnell Hall's video about book signings. What is the most unusual experience you've had at a book signing or author event?

Parnell Hall’s video says it all for a new author.  You show up with a singing heart to find a cluster of one and leave with a leaden belly.  Ah well, I don’t mind all that much.  Small parts of a dream are better than none at all.  For a former teacher, there was the additional benefit of encountering past students, who had seemed to have aged a great deal while I remained unchanged.

What's the best thing about eBooks? What's the worst?

Anything that opens the door to reading is a good thing.  eBooks do that.  As for me, I’ll take the heft of the printed page, even War and Peace.  My old books are chock full of notes that reflect my misunderstanding of the text, a story of their own.  The books that came from my long gone pal still have coffee and beer stains on them, depending on whether it was breakfast or lunch, occasionally these are set off by smears of grease, most likely from a leisurely lunch at Ralph’s Burritos, where we grabbed a heart stopping lunch before returning to the ship to unload cargo along the docks in San Pedro.  I love turning the pages of my mother’s battered cookbook dog-eared at her favorite recipes.  Rereading her collection of David Dodge mysteries knowing that my fingers are touching hers through a paper window in time lifts my heart.  Me, I think of cans and wire as a cell phone, and although I do appreciate the spread of semi-literate work (unkind that, I know), absolutely nothing can replace the physicality of a book.

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Thank you so much for spending this time with us. It's wonderful having this opportunity to get to know you a little better!

Shadow of the Raven by David Sundstrand

Title: Shadow of the Raven
Author: David Sundstrand
ISBN: 9780312361358
Publisher: Minotaur Books, 2007
Hardcover, 320 pages
Genre: Environmental mystery, #1 Desert Sky mystery
Rating: B+
Source: Purchased from Bookcloseouts.

First Line: Finding another dead body ruined Frank Flynn's day off.

Frank Flynn is an officer of the Bureau of Land Management on the California side of the Mojave Desert. The son of an immigrant Irish railroad man and a half-Mexican, half-Paiute mother, he lives in the caboose that his father brought out to a remote area when the railroad stopped running there.

Although Frank loves teaching people about the desert, its beauty, and the wildlife that lives there, he could do without the thoughtless souls who tear up the fragile ecosystem with their campers and all-terrain vehicles. Moreover, if you really want to make him angry, bring up the topic of rich hunters who hire poverty-stricken Indians to lead them to protected Bighorn rams. The rams are then shot, and their heads taken to adorn the walls of some fancy den or study.

Frank is no stranger to finding human remains in the desert-- people who have gotten lost, run out of water, and died-- but this time the corpse he finds is different. This man has been murdered, left out in the merciless sun to die. Instead of convincing his colleagues of the man's murder, one of the tracks in the sand that Frank finds provides fodder for a running joke. A day or so later when Frank learns that three bikers are looking for a missing buddy, he's positive the dead man is connected to them.

Since the bikers are gaining a reputation for picking fights and maiming-- even killing-- when it suits them, the BLM agent knows that the chances of other people losing their lives is growing by the hour. Since the other law enforcement agencies aren't paying a bit of attention to him, Frank knows it's up to him to stop these men, and if he finds time to save his bighorn sheep, that will be icing on the cake.

I am no stranger to the Mojave Desert, although my treks have kept me to the Arizona side of this desert. It is a land of harsh and uncompromising beauty as long as you take the time to get out of your vehicle and walk a bit. Perhaps its saving grace is that, to most people, it looks so desolate that most of them never venture off the interstate. Since I have a particular fondness for crime fiction set in desert locales, I was happy when I ran across this book.

 I'd barely begun to read when it became obvious that the author has a love of and an eye for the desert, too:

Emptiness? Vast, uncluttered, rigorously frugal, but never empty. It was full of shapes and colors and the stillness of open places, a land of illusions, a place where cloud shadows moved across a dreamscape of empty lakes whose dry beds miraculously filled with water when the desert gods emptied the sky in dark torrents, washing the rocks and filling the canyons with ephemeral rivers of brown water.

Frank Flynn is a marvelously realized character in both his relationships to people and to the desert. Sundstrand also does an excellent job in depicting how the various law enforcement agencies-- police, the Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the Bureau of Land Management-- don't always agree on how things should be done... or even on who should do them.

For me, the villains and the plot proved to be a bit weak. The bad guys were just the sort of people I love to despise, but they really didn't rise above the two-dimensional. As for the plot, a few things were mentioned in passing that were all too easily guessed as having something to do with the denouement. Although the author switched around the timing of the two plot threads concerning the rich trophy hunter and the bikers, there really weren't any surprises in what happened.

In books where the characterization and setting aren't so rich and detailed, these weaknesses would make a huge difference. In the case of Shadow of the Raven, I can overlook them a bit as I look for the next book in the series. I most definitely want to read more of Frank Flynn and the Mojave Desert.

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