Henrietta Hay's Column

I've made some new friends and connected with a couple of old ones this holiday season - the kind I find on the pages of books. My real friends have earned gold stars by bringing good cheer, good soup and a whole stack of mysteries during a virus invasion.

These are multi-colored characters that I have met recently. And the various cultures, which exist in our diverse country, are sometimes not all that different from each other. They all have bad guys and good guys . And when the young women relate to the men in their lives, it doesn't matter too much whether their skin is white or black or red. I do wonder about the color of the alien females that so many of our citizens seem to believe are among us. Guess I'll have to start listening to more late night radio.

One interesting new character is Tamara Hayle, a beautiful African-American woman born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, making her living as a Private Investigator and raising a son by herself. She is the creation of Valerie Wilson Wesley. "Devil Riding" is Wesley's seventh novel, and I enjoyed her description of the middle class African-American experience in a metropolitan city, blended with a well-designed detective story. In this one Tamara heads for Atlantic City looking for a teenage runaway from an influential black family. She gets involved with a group of teen girls and some pretty dirty family secrets, but toughs it out to solve the mystery (of course). This is an author to watch. A mystery in my unread pile is set in Harlem with African-American heroines and villains. It is Grace F. Edwards' "Do or Die," and looks interesting.

Another new heroine has copper colored skin. In "Redbird's Cry," Jean Hagar has created Molly Bearpaw, an investigator for the Native American Advocacy League in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Like Tamara, Molly is a single working woman. She does not have children but does have an oversized golden retriever named Homer. She also has an elderly widowed landlord who keeps a fatherly eye on her, and reminds me of V. I. Warshawski's friend, Mr. Contreras. The bitter conflict between members of the Cherokee Nation and the True Echota Band sets up the plot, from wise elders coping with contemporary life to renegade youngsters ignoring ancient tribal traditions. Hmmm. That has a familiar ring.

An old friend, Vicky Holden is back in Margaret Coel's new adventure, "The Spirit Woman." Like Molly Bearpaw, Vicky is a beautiful young woman who has copper colored skin, but her home is far from the Cherokees. She is an attorney for the in Arapaho tribe in Wyoming. Vicky and Father John O'Malley, the priest who serves the tribe, investigate the disappearance of a history professor who was visiting the Wind River Reservation. The question centers around the real Shoshone Indian, Sacajawea. When did she die? Where is she buried? And were her memoirs really destroyed? This is one of Coel's best.

Tony Hillerman writes that Coel's mysteries, "shouldn't be missed by anyone interested in either new trends in mystery writing or contemporary Indian culture. She's a master at both."

A heroine with white skin turned out to be the perfect light weight read for someone with a runny nose and no energy. Elizabeth MacPherson is back in "The PMS Outlaws," by Sharyn McCrumb. Elizabeth, a forensic anthropologist and amateur sleuth, spends most of this volume in a hospital fighting depression brought on by her husband's death. She learns that insanity is liberating from polite hypocrisy, enabling a "crazy lady" to comment that "Anorexia is not a disease; it's a career move." Actually there are several plots going at once, including one involving her brother Bill and his law partner A. P. Hill (don't ever call her Amy). One story line involves hunting down the PMS Outlaws, an escaped convict and her fugitive attorney, two women on a gender-rage rampage through Appalachia who delight in tricking men out of their clothes and wallets. It is not as good as some of McCrumb's mysteries, but it is light and frivolous and a lot of fun.

I may get around to serious reading some day, but for now I'm quite content sitting back and relaxing with a good mystery.