Devil’s Claw, Texas – The Present

Dana Vanover‘s emotionally distant mother introduces her to her niece, a little girl her sister, Angie, gave up for adoption seven years ago. The child fights for life, hospitalized until a desperately needed bone marrow transplant can be found. Angie never listed a father’s name on the birth certificate. The only chance for the child is that Angie might be a donor match. But drug user and alcoholic loser Angie has relocated to a barren West Texas desert, supposedly in an attempt to regain sobriety. Dana has few hopes of that, but when she discovers Angie is missing, Dana drives to Devil's Claw to find her.

Dana finds the inhabitants of Devil’s Claw unfriendly and unhelpful. They hate environmental nut case Angie, who had railed against the development of the area’s salt domes, a project that would bring much needed income into their depressed community. And these citizens deal with unwanted strangers in their own way.

County Sheriff Jay Eversole, a handsome Iraq war veteran, has searched for Angie since she was reported missing. He discourages the sister, a stranger unfamiliar with the desert, to begin a private search. Survival in the desert depends on knowledge and experience. Besides, Angie probably took off on another bender; she should show up when it is over. Dana ignores him.

She finds the abandoned adobe house where Angie stayed. Her loom, the one constant in Angie’s life, remains behind, bearing a beautiful but incomplete weaving. Dana knows Angie would never abandon her loom. Something is very wrong. With the nearest motel an hour’s drive away, Dana stays in the bleak shelter to continue her search, now not only to inform Angie about her daughter’s need, but also to ascertain Angie's whereabouts. Shortly Dana discovers Angie's sobriety diary and then a salt-mummified body presumed to be her sister. When bullets start flying, she realizes someone is trying to kill her.

THE SALT MAIDEN is a gripping read. Author Colleen Thompson shows Dana’s ambivalence about her sister, her unbearable knowledge of Angie’s loss to addiction, and mixes these emotions with her love and worry for her older sister in an apparent but unobtrusive way. Dana is a strong character, tough enough to forget about her own difficulty -- an unexpected hysterectomy that led her fiancé to dump her just before the wedding -- to try to save her sister and her niece. The relationship that springs between her and the troubled sheriff suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder seems sublimely right, although both they and the reader believe this love can only be a short, heart-breaking affair. The mystery of Angie’s disappearance and how the people of Devil’s Claw react is deftly wrapped into a tense mystery involving con artists, an Indian legend, an insane hunter and a dying child.

Robin Lee