Grandmother Spider: A Charlie Moon Mystery

The incomparable mysteries of James D. Doss, featuring the amiable, outsized Ute tribal policeman Charlie Moon and his irascible shaman aunt Daisy Perika, are brilliantly conceived, richly atmospheric puzzles generously sprinkled with humor and Native American mysticism, and teeming with characters as colorful and memorable as any found in contemporary fiction. The enchantment is more potent than ever before in this spellbinding tale of lethal human depravity and a legendary nightmare come alive.<P>A lawman with a hardy appetite for life and an unshakable faith in the explicable and rational, Charlie Moon has never taken his grumpy aunt Daisy's visions and premonitions seriously. He is especially skeptical of the old woman's stories about "Grandmother Spider, " a gargantuan avenging arachnid that allegedly rises up out of Navajo Lake in search of human prey. But on April first, in the still, utter darkness of the Colorado night, Daisy and her young ward, Sarah, see "something" striding across the "Canon del Espiritu." And "something" carries off Tommy Tonompicket and his unlikely drinking companion, research scientist William Pizinski, that same night, after ripping the hood off of Tommy's truck. And then there's the mangled, headless corpse lying outside a cabin in the mountains, with two large, fanglike punctures in its chest ...<P>Charlie is not prepared to accept a purely supernatural explanation for the recent occurrences.<P>This is murder, in Moon's opin