Iced

Meg's working her first legitimate job in years as a repo woman. Told to pick up former air force pilot Clay Bennett's Jeep, she's not exactly grief- stricken when she hears that Bennett's been killed in some kind of drunken exchange with a young Indian woman--it will make her job a lot easier. There's something familiar about the woman, Tina Red Deer, but until Bennett's Jeep is stolen from outside Meg's house and her life is threatened over a briefcase that was in his car, she doesn't make the connection between Bennett's supposed killer and her father's long-ago affair with a Native American woman that led him to abandon Meg and her mother. Even then, the connections are slow in coming. Meg has her hands full just trying to stay alive once it's clear that Bennett's briefcase seems to be missing some maps that a couple of very dangerous people will do anything to get--including kill the only man she's loved and trusted since her father deserted her.

The plot is less clear-cut than it might be, and Meg's connection with Tina Red Deer, while psychologically interesting, isn't successful from a novelistic point of view. Meg herself remains the center of the mystery; one senses that only a few of her many dimensions have been explored here, owing to the limitations of the plot. But there are flashes of sheer brilliance in the narrative and wonderful metaphorical descriptions of an unforgiving landscape:

Growing up, I loved the fire season, the perpetual dusk that hung over the valley, the extraterrestrial sunsets ... some afternoons, when lightning storms raked across the mountains, dozens of small fires smoldered in the thick cover of the evergreens.If I think of my life in terms of combustion, it's this kind of lightning fire that comes to mind. Not a flash immolation but a slow kindling, a red ember smoking for hours, even days, until it explodes in the dry underbrush and the forest bursts into fiery tongues. Though I can't pinpoint the instant when my life ignited, there are important moments I go back to again and again. Like the day almost 20 years ago when my mother shot my father.