Mask of the Deer Woman by Laurie L. Dove

This looked like an interesting book when I grabbed it at the library--big-city detective fallen hard, lands in the Reservation where her father grew up, where the cases of missing young women resonate with the death of her own daughter; Indigenous myth bleeds over into a more materialist surface existence. All those things are there, but the novel itself is not strong enough to carry that much weight. There are two sociopaths working on and around this particular rez, and they have overlapping if opposed motivations, and the baseline reality is never well-enough-established for the incursions of magic or myth or spirit or whatever to actually register as wrong or at least other, and the investigator is badly troubled and way out of her cultural depth--both of those serve to make the events of the story even more muddled; the muddling is not helped by the investigator being the only character that feels at all realized--the charitable reading is that she can't bridge the cultural gap to connect with them.. The Deer Woman here bears a strong resemblance to the "monster" in Stephen Graham Jones' The Only Dead Indians, which means only that Ms. Dove might have pulled from a similar pocket of myth. The prose here is best described as 'functional," there weren't any glaring infelicities.