Owl of the Desert

Rating:
Summary: taut, imaginative drama
Review: Kate Porter is a welcome character, one that's principled and tough and at the same time driven to do the right thing. She knows who she is and why she's taking on the right wing paramilitary organization founded by her father. Unusual features such as her prison experience and her undercover "handler" penchant for birdwatching make this an inventive mystery.

Rating:
Summary: Engrossing
Review: The characters and the story are fascinating. I couldn't put it down!

Rating:
Summary: Thoroughly Compelling
Review: Within the first page of Owl of the Desert, author Ida Swearingen ensnares the reader's attention with her character, Kate Porter, just out after 12 years in federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky. Kate, sitting inside a dingy bus station, is waiting for the three o'clock express to Kansas City. After so long of seeing only photos of "heroin-thin" models in magazines and "plastic" television women, Kate is surprised by how real people on the outside look. She's too intimidated to go into a tacky coffee shop to order an alluring meal.

Kate, whose mother's death and bringing up by a far-out militia fanatic father, has arrived at this point in her life because of a failed bank job that Bud, her daddy, dragged her into. The robbery resulted in the death in Kate's arms of an innocent woman, a loss for which Kate wanted to pay. Now, being "handled" by a Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent, Kate intends to help force her father to ground, so he may account for his crimes. This hunt brings the protagonist face to face with her bizarre family legacy and a former prison girlfriend with whom Kate is still in love.

Swearingen's writing is top-notch and her storytelling ability, superb. The reason she's not in mainstream print (most likely) is the sexual orientation of her central character--and that's a shame. In this day and age, with at least one big-publisher mystery line issuing homosexual crime fiction (at mystery factory St. Martin's Press), more of the traditional houses should be following suit. Not that anything is wrong in going with a smaller, feminist mystery specialty house, except, in this case, it may cheat the potential wider readership-and the author, who might otherwise enjoy better distribution and attendant financial rewards. The reality is that nothing is in here which heterosexual readers should find disturbing. The book is a page-turner with a captivating and utterly sympathetic protagonist.

Swearingen does write "commercially." That is, she includes all the elements mystery readers always hunger for-intriguing situations, complex characters, artful language use, and just the right emotional nuance. Any author writing crime fiction at this level deserves to be feted.

Hopefully, the book will gain a share of fans among those daring enough to buy a book out of their usual reach. Owl of the Desert is a carefully and sensitively constructed story worth delving into, and sexual orientation should be no bar. G. Miki Hayden, author of New Pacific, a cross-genre novel from Silver Lake Publishing, reviewing for Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine.