A PREDATOR IS FREE TO KILL AGAIN – HOUR BY HOUR, HE DRAWS CLOSER

After only six years in prison, Andrew Carlisle has ben released. A brilliant psychopath convicted of the brutal torture-murder of a Papago (Tohono O’Odham) Indian girl, he is free once more to prowl the Arizona desert to feed his insatiable hunger for blood and fear . . .and revenge.

A teacher on the Tohono O’Odham reservation, Diana Ladd’s testimony once helped put Andrew Carlisle behind bars. And now the terrified young widow can’t ignore the dire peril foretold in dark, mystical omens and ancient Papago lore.

A hunter is stalking Diana Ladd and her son . . . and his hour is at hand.

When it came time to write Hour of the Hunter the second time, I had been away from the reservation for nearly twenty years. Needing to reacquaint myself, I put in requests for more than seventy inter-library loans. The books came to me over the next several months. One of them was a book by Harold Bell Wright called Long Ago Told. This book, long out of print, contained vivid retellings of ancient Papago (Tohono O’Odham) legends that had been unavailable on the reservation in written form for generations.

In reading that book, I was struck by the story of The Woman who Loved Field Hockey. In that story, a woman loves playing field hockey so much that she neglects her own child. Here I was writing a book about a woman named Diana Ladd who wants to be a writer so much that she is neglecting her child. It was clear to me that these were the same story. I desperately wanted to put the Papago (Tohono O’Odham) legend into Hour of the Hunter, but I write murder mysteries. It’s against the rules to drop a legend into the middle of one of those for no other reason than the writer wants to.

That’s when I decided to weave pieces of legends into the background of my book. What evolved was more a like french braiding a book than it was writing one. I didn’t change the legends and I didn’t change my story, and yet they blended together into a wonderful whole, one I’m still proud of ten years later.

Writing Hour of the Hunter also gave me a chance to pass along some of the things I learned while living on the reservation. I worked in the public school system there for five years. I can only hope that I taught as much as I was privileged to learn.

JAJ