Lakota Dreaming
This book was a very nice surprise. It was well written, had engaging characters and a romance that felt naturally occurring. it also had a great sense of place and atmosphere.
Zora is a NYC editor at a big fashion magazine who is on an enforced "break" from her job because she has been acting erratically. Turns out, Zora is suffering from rather vivid dreams involving an ancestor, a former slave named Julia who lived among and married into the Lakota Sioux 150 years ago. At the behest of her therapist, Zora travels to South Dakota to the Oglala nation to see if she can find out any information with the hopes of stopping the dreams.
There Zora meets John Iron Hawk the Chief of Police on the Reservation. He is immediately suspicious of her and her motives having seen too many times a slick rich looking people like her come to the People to do silly articles. But Zora earns an ally in an elder who feels something in her story and is determined to help her seek the truth.
This is a romance, but it is more appropriately a romantic suspense because there is a real mystery surrounding the fate of Julia and Zora is placed in jeopardy as she unearths those secrets. Also present is a light dose of the mystical woo-woo.
While this story has some of the rather recognizable romance elements (Zora and John's animosity hides attraction) and romantic suspense elements (the bad guy manages to orchestrate things just so in order to silence Zora) the thing that I liked best were the pieces that were not necessarily plot related.
There was a nice bit of setting in that the book takes place on a Reservation that that is struggling with poverty and services not being properly funded despite being the site of a thriving Casino that is raking in millions weekly. The frustration of the people is shown in little and big ways. And the results of being at the mercy of leaders who aren't looking out for their best interest is also shown in little and big ways. In the midst of this comes Zora with her poking about and raising hackles.
The biggest con for me is the suspense element of the romantic suspense. I don't think the author connected the dots in a believable way. I thought the villain was too immediately concerned with Zora. Her excuse of wanting to track down info about an ancestor from 150 years ago should not have caused the consternation it did as early as it did. We later find out why her poking about was of concern and how a 150 y.o mystery could be dangerous to someone in the present time, but I don't think the road to that realization was as carefully plotted as it could have been.
Overall though this was a good story that had nicely crafted characters, an evocative mood and a believable romance.
