Lif Strand

New Mexico. Fourth of July. Special Deputy Jessie Torres, her grandmother who is a Apache curandera. An infusion of odd-acting wolves. All of these combine to make Dark Green a well written and attention grabbing novel.

Jessie was hired to investigate any interaction between wolf packs, wolves and humans. She is noticing activity in the wolves that isn’t right and sets out to figure it out. Add to this mix is the arrival of the Rainbow Family; a group of hippies who take a different National Forest every year to congregate, get high and hang out. Are they in the middle of all this?

Jessie’s sister may have killed her wayward husband. She had good reasons.

This book does a great job of describing New Mexico and the politics that threaten every state in the Union. Protect the wolves? Put them down? A tangled mess that doesn’t apply to them, of course but to all of us.

A great book on cultures and single beliefs.… (meer)

Dark Green is a unique story that revolves around wolves and ends up in murder. Jessie Torres is responsible for investigating when wolves attack, and she is well-suited to this work. Her family have been in the New Mexico wilderness for many generations, and she knows the land, the people, and the behavior of wolves. Jessie is an interesting and well-drawn character, as are the characters of her sister and grandmother. Jessie knows something is wrong with the wolf attacks she's seeing, and a good part of this story is her unraveling the mystery of what's going on, as well as trying to figure out how it's related to a murder.

The characters kept me reading and engaged more than the plot. The plot itself isn't bad, especially in the first 70% of the book, but then to me it kind of falls apart and some of the characters aren't given enough storyline to really understand what motivates them or why they end up where they end up. The last part of the book is a bit too facile and missing in continuity and plot development. I found the ending to be abrupt and while the scenes were exciting and well-written, there just wasn't enough context to make it all hang together with any kind of satisfying cohesion.

Overall, this is an interesting tale, and even though the ending was a bit messy, I did enjoy reading it.… (meer)