Murder in the past and now in the present…

Thomas King is a Canadian author who lives and writes in the USA. Obsidian is a book in his series featuring an ex-police officer, Thumps Dreadfulwater. He is a man from the Cherokee nation who presently works as a photographer in the town of Chinook. Thumps has been haunted by a past mass murder which he investigated when he was a police officer. Ten people were brutally bludgeoned to death over the course of three days and their bodies left near the shoreline. A common factor was a piece of obsidian inserted in the mouths of the victims. The bodies included those of his girlfriend and her young daughter. The case was never solved and Thumps has tried ever since to forget it.

Now the killer seems to have followed Thumps to Chinook and is taunting him with souvenirs from the Obsidian case, although he isn’t sure if his girlfriend and her child were murdered by the same person as the other victims. To add to his discontent a movie crew has arrived in town with information that a murdered TV producer had compiled following research on the Obsidian case – they plan to make a movie that will include a lot of fiction as well as facts that they think are new.

This is a complex mystery, told with dry wit and humour and an overall impression of sadness and regret. The desert landscape is very much part of the story. The dialogue between Thumps and the towns’ quirky inhabitants is funny and a delight to read but the danger from the killer is real and Thumps has to do a lot of investigating to determine the identity of the murderer.

I enjoyed this book a lot and shall now look for others in this series.