Wingbeat
Tempe Crabtree Mystery Series
By Marilyn Meredith

       Unlike the rest of California, the fictional town of Bear Creek doesn’t consider marijuana a “safe” drug. Deputy Tempe Crabtree, the Native American heroine of Marilyn Meredith’s award-winning mystery series, may be consigned to patrol by her dismissive male counterparts, but she knows the law as well as she knows her pastor husband, Hutch. Or does she?

       It seems that while some pot growers insist on stonewalling Tempe, citizens of the small community where she lives and enforces the law insist that Hutch is yet another man of the cloth gone bad. Could gentle, loving Hutch, who disapproves Of Tempe’s association with Native American shamanism, expose himself to schoolchildren? Tempe doesn’t think so, but her son Blair, a hotheaded firefighter, does. More to the point, even her boss suspects Hutch. Where’s a peace pipe or a rain dance when you need one?

       What else could go wrong? One of the marijuana farmers turns up dead, and to top it all off, she’s actually the missing granddaughter of Tempe’s friend Joe Seaberry, a retired cop. Did Seventeen Seaberry’s hotheaded, potheaded husband kill her, or does Joe know more than he’s telling? Tempe ponders the unthinkable once again, and though she wants to believe Joe, the case against him is nearly nil, unlike the case against Hutch.

       Fortunately, Tempe’s multiple roles, as Yanduchi-born woman, wife, mother, and deputy, give her multiple insights and eyes as powerful as the owl that foretells death among her people. And as her male chauvinist superiors cavalierly suggest, she has a “woman’s touch” when it comes to dealing with wounded spirits. Also, at the end of the day, she has a strong marriage, held together by faith and true love.

      Tempe and Hutch create a realistic portrait of an interfaith marriage held together by the values of love, commitment, trust, and sacrifice. Author Marilyn Meredith continues to be a strong voice for the Christian faith as well as for women in fiction, particularly female law enforcement officers rain-dancing as fast as they can to break the glass ceiling. Just say yes to Tempe Crabtree.