Ruby Hands

When Daisy Sandoval, a young mother who teaches school on a Native American reservation in Arizona, is found near death in a ravine, tribal members suspect foul play. They focus on Harlan Sandoval, Daisy's ex-husband, a defrocked Pente- costal preacher who now heads a family-run criminal gang on the reservation.

Kate Thorsen, a freelance writer, flies to Arizona when she learns that Daisy, her only niece, is barely clinging to life. After Daisy dies, Kate moves to the reservation and attempts to solve the riddle of her niece's death. Then she discovers that Daisy's two children are missing. In a place where cultures clash and people distrust outsiders, few are willing to talk. But Kate eventually finds her life radically changed by a Mohave shaman, who dares her to stand up to Harlan and his thugs.

Evidently, Cheryl Romo was somebody’s big secret until now. No one writes this well the first time out, do they, with such savvy, insight, and brio, with such dazzling prose? Well, secret no more, folks; this genie’s out of the bottle. Cheryl Romo’s Ruby Hands is at once both exhilarating and profoundly dis- turbing. It’s as fine and chilling a literary detective story, if I can call it that, as you are likely to read. Here is a forbidding landscape of shattered lives and broken dreams, where nothing is as it seems, where life on the reservation goes from bad to worse to unimaginable. What talent, what nerve, what an achingly beautiful and astonishing first novel.

—John Dufresne, author of Louisiana Power & Light and Love Warps the Mind a Little