“As a Diné person who has worked in forensics for 16 years, I saw death,” Ramona Emerson says. “I saw death all the time.” 

She speaks by phone from her home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, explaining how her Navajo heritage and work as a forensic photographer and videographer informed the creation of Rita Todacheene, a forensic photographer for the Albuquerque Police Department. Emerson’s first mystery starring Rita, Shutter, was a surprise hit that garnered numerous accolades and awards, including a spot on the National Book Award longlist.

“I wasn’t expecting anyone to read it, to tell you the truth,” she admits. Emerson, who is also a documentary filmmaker, adds, “I’ve never had anyone be interested in what I was doing.” 

Indeed, there has been great anticipation for Exposure, the second book in her projected trilogy. Rita is summoned to photograph a horrific crime scene in the opening chapter: the murder of a retired police detective, his wife and six of their children. The oldest son, a teenager, is a suspect, but the ghost of one of his murdered sisters leads Rita to believe he is innocent.

Rita’s ability to see and hear the spirits of the dead is both a gift and a curse: The constant din of their voices becomes physically, emotionally and spiritually exhausting. Navajo tradition, however, makes it taboo to talk about death, so Emerson had serious concerns about how her character might be received. “You don’t talk about people once they have died. You have a four-day mourning period and it’s done,” she explains. “So, my biggest fear about writing Shutter was that I was going to have some sort of Navajo backlash.” Instead, she happily discovered, many Native readers thanked her for openly discussing the subject.

“There are Navajo Nation police officers who see death—and nurses, doctors and forensic workers,” Emerson says. “Pathologists, scientists, all these people who work with life and death. And we do our jobs because that’s what we’re trained to do, and we’re good at it. And so, this second book is about this idea of Rita realizing that she has a spiritual side that she’s not tending to.” 

“It’s a really big part of your work-life balance,” she continues. “Like, you gotta worry about how much you’re putting your psyche and your mental stability and your own body on the line to get work done. And a lot of what I write about in Exposure was Rita’s own healing, embracing the ideas of Navajo traditional culture, and why it’s there to protect you.”

Emerson has experienced a few paranormal events—although quite different from her character’s encounters. Once, while teaching a summer film workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she and two others heard a strange noise in an editing room where they had been having odd technical problems with the equipment. They all turned around and watched a coffee mug move on the table, all by itself. “We saged that editing room out so fast!” says Emerson. In addition, on the same campus, she felt something grab her behind the bleachers in the black-box theater, where she and others were filming a production. “I thought maybe I just stumbled and there was something behind the curtain. But about 30 minutes later, when I got in my car, I had three huge scratches on my arm.”

Emerson has also had her own share of nightmares from difficult cases. In fact, Emerson’s late grandmother was so worried about her granddaughter that she took her to see a medicine man about a year and a half into the job. And in Exposure, Rita’s grandmother travels from the Navajo Nation town of Tohatchi—where Emerson herself grew up—to bring a medicine man to help Rita when her job becomes overwhelming. 

Like Rita’s grandmother, Emerson’s grandmother played a pivotal role in her life. “She taught me to read and she was a big reader,” Emerson recalls. “She was real big on stories. She bought me my first video camera. She took me to the movies, even if she didn’t want to watch them. She just supported that idea of being a storyteller. I wrote these little stories and she always read them.” Although she died in 2001, Emerson notes, “She’s still a big part of my life. I always think about her.”

Despite her abiding interest in stories, Emerson never set out to write crime fiction, and her path to becoming a novelist has been particularly long and winding. Surprisingly, writing has never come easily to her. “It’s hard for me to sit in one place and do one thing for a long period of time,” Emerson says. Instead, her life’s dream was to make movies, and her initial attraction to film involved a touch of forensics, almost as though foreshadowing her future career. 

Growing up in Tohatchi, there wasn’t much to do, so she and her friends watched VHS tapes that they rented from a man in a trailer “with like a hundred crazy strange movies in there.” That included a horror film, Faces of Death, about a pathologist who presents a variety of gruesome deaths. Once the adults left the house,  Emerson recalls, “we’d go and get all of that horrible, horrible stuff that we weren’t supposed to watch, and we’d watch it right away.” Harkening back to Navajo taboos about discussing death, she adds, “So when we watched Faces of Death and didn’t explode, we figured that it’s all just a bunch of hooey.” 

“When I’m writing, I feel like I’m walking through the room with a video camera and describing it for you.”

Later, when her mother took her to see Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues in a theater, Emerson was transfixed, and decided she wanted to make her own films. After studying film at the University of New Mexico, she had trouble finding a job, which is how she ended up as a forensic photographer. She blindly called a man whose audiovisual company had police contracts. “He was kind of a mean, gruff, walrus-looking guy, and his name was like 10th on the Yellow Pages list.” Eventually, she says, she did photography as well as video work for him, “because I was the only one who could put up with him. He was so mean.” 

In addition to photographing crime scenes, part of her work was making what she calls “day in the life” documentaries to show how peoples’ lives had been compromised by injuries. “My job,” she explains, “was to get the worst stuff on camera and make sure companies settled cases before they got to a jury. Because they knew if the jury saw my video, they would give them way too much money.” She adds, “I would have dreams about these people for months. I think the live people were the ones that stayed with me more than the dead people.” 

However, she says that in both her forensics work and her fiction, focusing carefully on the details of dead bodies helps humanize victims. “I would always think, ‘Oh my God, this is so horrible. This is somebody’s daughter. This is somebody’s mom.’ That’s where my mind always went. And so, by talking about the details, and everything that you could possibly say about who they are and what happened to them kind of honors them in a way.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Emerson’s prose is so immediate, her descriptions so vivid. “When you’re doing a documentary and you want people to understand who a person is, you film their room, you film their hands,” she explains. “You show how dirty their fingernails are. You look at their shoes, where they live, what the town is like, all of that stuff. I think I just attack stories the same way as I would attack a visual story.” She adds, “When I’m writing, I feel like I’m walking through the room with a video camera and describing it for you.” 

Plus, she says, “I think people don’t realize how long you’re there [photographing crime scenes]. On TV, it’s like everybody’s in and out in 10 minutes, but when you have a big murder scene or you’ve got something like that first scene in Exposure where there’s a whole family, that could take two or three days of processing. You take thousands of photographs, pictures of every little thing, even if you don’t think it matters. You spend a lot of time out in the boonies by yourself photographing really weird things, or in strange positions, underneath vehicles. So, I think just giving readers the breadth of how many photographs Rita takes gives people a real idea of how hard it is to do the work physically.”

Emerson’s years of forensic work had a bonus of giving her access to her boss’s cameras and editing equipment. She began making her own movies as well, and she and her husband, Kelly Byars (also a filmmaker), formed a production company called Reel Indian Pictures. Byars is a member of the Choctaw Nation, and heritage is a primary focus for both. Their documentaries include The Mayor of Shiprock, about a group of young Navajos who meet each week to improve their small community in Shiprock, New Mexico. 

Emerson also enrolled in a creative writing MFA program at the University of New Mexico, obtaining her master’s degree in 2015. While there, she began writing stories about her grandmother, and was also writing about some of her forensic cases as background for a possible documentary about Navajos who work in forensics. The resulting pages were what she describes as “a weird collection of research and stories”—and she couldn’t figure out how to unify the hodgepodge.

At the same time, Emerson enrolled in a 16-week CSI course offered by the Albuquerque Police Department, hoping to learn more about forensic science and technical procedures. The topic of the first session was a terrible case involving a woman who jumped off a highway bridge, with accompanying graphic photos. “I think half of our class didn’t come back after that,” she recalls. “It was brutal. But I went home and wrote about that case.” 

When she presented the chapter to her MFA class, her mentor, novelist Sherman Alexie, responded, “I’m so disturbed. I’m sickened by that chapter. But I want you to make that your first chapter. And add six to 10 pages more, because I also want to know every detail.” Emerson took his advice. “Once I did that, everything else started to fall into place. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is what I’m supposed to be doing.’ ” Suddenly, her musings and observations coalesced into a first draft of her debut novel, Shutter. 

All told, however, the writing process took 10 years—quite different from the almost rapid-fire way she wrote its follow-up. “I really had 10 years to lament over every page of that first book,” she says. “This time, I just had to move on.” One thing that helped was that she was also working on a docuseries (Crossing the Line) about border town violence and death in several communities surrounding the Navajo Nation, including Albuquerque and Gallup, New Mexico—both of which are crime scene locations in Exposure. “It was easy for me to research both things at the same time,” Emerson explains. “And it just kind of fell into place.” She adds that she has witnessed policing from the perspective of officers, the court system and lawyers, but also notes, “It’s a different kind of experience for people of color. Policing is about enforcing white laws on brown bodies. I think a lot of people think police protect them, but brown and Black people don’t believe that police are there to protect them. And I think that’s probably why I speak about that a lot in my stories, and about corruption.” 

Just as Rita Todacheene speaks for the crime victims who can no longer voice their stories, Emerson works to champion Native women in both her books and films. “I really feel like there’s not another group of women who are more underrepresented than Native women,” she says. “They’re never talked about; they’re never given a chance. And that’s why I feel the thing I have to do is give them power or give them a voice. Now, because of the missing and murdered Indigenous women’s movement, Native women are more visible. But it shouldn’t have to take our deaths to be able to tell our stories.” 

Emerson is already hard at work on the third book about Rita—although fans are likely to clamor for more after that, even though her story began as a planned trilogy. “I may take a break after the third book and write a different book,” Emerson says. “But I have a feeling that somebody is going to try to resurrect Rita at some point, and it’ll be tough to keep her down as a character.”

Photo of Ramona Emerson by Ungelbah Davila Shivers.

Texas Ranger Darren Mathews wants out of his genre.

Or that’s what the husband of Attica Locke, author of the Highway 59 mystery trilogy, said when he finished reading Guide Me Home, Locke’s exceptional final volume in the series. 

“It’s as if he’s kind of done with the cops and robbers of it all,” Locke says of Darren, the flawed lawman who first entranced readers in 2017’s Edgar Award-winning Bluebird, Bluebird. There, Darren slipped into seedy Aryan Brotherhood bars to help a grieving wife solve her husband’s murder. His uncle William was the first Black Texas Ranger, and Darren followed in his footsteps, wearing his silver star with pride. 2019’s Heaven, My Home saw him investigating the disappearance of a white supremacist’s son, as Darren’s marriage unraveled and his drinking got worse. Throughout both books, Frank Vaughn, a white district attorney with political ambitions, tries to expose Darren for lying to secure the freedom of an elderly Black man, who was accused of a crime he didn’t commit.

Guide Me Home is set three years after Heaven, My Home. Vaughn is still building his case, and a depressed, soul-weary Darren decides to take an early retirement from law enforcement. The very day he turns in his badge, his troublemaking mother, Bell, shows up uninvited at his family home. Bell blackmailed Darren in Heaven, and she is the key witness in Vaughn’s case. But she brings with her something Darren cannot resist: the kernel of a case. Sera Fuller, a Black college student, has gone missing, and the members of the all-white sorority she joined know more than they’ll admit.

Highway 59 snakes from the northeastern corner of Texas down through Houston, Locke’s hometown, and sweeps southwest to the border. “We would drive up and down Highway 59 all the time to go visit grandparents and relatives,” Locke tells BookPage from her home in Los Angeles. “And those car rides were my early kind of daydreaming out the window, thinking about stories, just making stuff up in my head.”

Locke often shifts from project to project, writing novels (Pleasantville, The Cutting Season) and for TV (Empire, When They See Us). The years she spent writing Guide Me Home were catastrophic: COVID-19, the murder of George Floyd and the 2023 Writers Guild strike all weighed heavily on Locke’s mind as she sent her hero hurtling toward ruin. She asks readers to grope around in the dark with Darren as he confronts truly painful truths, with the central mystery at times taking a backseat to his internal conflict and family drama. 

“Darren is also just my whole heart,” Locke says. “And I worry that readers would be like, ‘Wait a second. What are you doing here? He’s not doing all the shoot ’em up, bang, bang, tough guy stuff. Where is all that?’ . . . It has a different kind of energy about it.”

And yet, Locke’s take on the missing girl trope is a standout in a genre that sheds girls like skin cells. While Sera is away at a nearby college, her family lives in an insular gated community called Thornhill, where families work in chicken and pork processing factories on-site in exchange for their cookie-cutter houses, K-12 schools and top-notch health care. As is usually the case, the utopian concept is, in practice, anything but. Rather, it’s a modern sharecropping system that keeps workers from ever accumulating wealth, all while they breathe acrid air from factories that might just be making people sick. Sera’s father, a Black Trump supporter named Joseph, has become a puppet for the rich white people who own Thornhill, ready and willing to be the Black face of the “movement” for “compassionate capitalism.” He is clearly lying when he denies that Sera has disappeared from her college campus: Her belongings are found in the trash, including her medication for sickle cell anemia. 

Thornhill only truly clicked one day as Locke walked her dog: “I was thinking about two things that became really clear to people during COVID. We are not taking care of each other in terms of health care. It’s just really fucking difficult to be alive and have health care in this country. And capitalism does not give a shit about workers. . . . I’m realizing the ways in which COVID laid bare these two facts, and somehow they found their way into the soul and the plot of the book.”

The other valve in the dark heart of Guide Me Home is the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump and the escalating danger and sense of alienation it caused for Black Americans. Locke writes that Darren is “profoundly, unimaginatively sad in this world,” in the “fever dream that had been the years since Donald Trump was elected. Years that had laid bare the fragility of democracy.”

“This book series inadvertently became a treatise on the Trump era in a way that had not been intended,” Locke says. “I think in the series, Texas is often a stand­-in for America. There’s a reason there’s that saying, ‘As Texas goes, so goes the nation’ . . . there is a sense that Darren’s ambivalent feelings about loving Texas are, I think, a mirror for a lot of people who have ambivalent feelings about how do we love our country through its worst impulses.” 

Darren can’t imagine living anywhere else, even as the state constantly disappoints him. It disappoints Locke, too. “When I watch it from afar, it frequently breaks my heart to think of the Greg Abbotts of the [state] being what the rest of the world thinks Texas is,” she says, “when I know it to be, on the ground, infinitely more complex and infinitely less hateful. Now, I say that knowing full well that there are wild pockets of hateful people everywhere, and there are a lot of hateful people in Texas. But there are, I would argue, to some degree, more that aren’t.” 

It’s not lost on Locke, or on Darren, that being a Black cop is complicated. As the series progresses, Darren is at odds with two competing ideologies handed down by the uncles who raised him, Texas Ranger William and defense attorney Clayton: Must Black people be protected by the law, or from the law? Locke lays this out in chapter one: “Sure, it was a sentiment among Black cops these days that ‘Black Lives Matter’ meant a gun and the law had their purpose—safeguarding Black folks in every corner of American life. But Darren felt resentful of the idea that Black cops somehow bore the sole responsibility for this. Surely it was someone else’s turn to do the work of righting the country’s racial wrongs, case by trauma-inducing case.” 

Locke echoes this yearning: “There is a limit to what Black and brown folks can do alone to right some racial wrongs. And we kind of need help. And the hope is always that there will be folks who will consider that, just like I didn’t ask for the history on my back of slavery . . . You [meaning this white interviewer] also didn’t ask for all the privileges. You didn’t ask for it, but it’s real. So what do you do with it?”

All of this comes to bear on Darren’s psyche and heart. His alcoholism, present but not destructive in the first two books, is now raging. And his upbringing, developed marvelously in Bluebird and Heaven, comes into question. As an infant, Bell relinquished him to his uncles, and she’s breezed in and out of his life ever since, growing more manipulative and nasty with each episode. Her blackmailing him was the last straw. Darren’s trauma over her abandonment was so severe that he never asked her what happened, but took his well-meaning uncles’ version of the story as the truth. As he investigates Sera’s disappearance and Thornhill’s suspicious origins, he uncovers questions that only Bell can answer. Locke, whose daughter starts college this fall, hopes Guide Me Home will “flip how children see their parents.” The book’s dedication—“For every mother whose child knows only half the story”—conveys this hope, and Bell’s as well. Darren can only find home once he solves one final mystery, that of his own origins. 

The Highway 59 series closes during the 2019 holiday season. In a few months, a global pandemic will take over the world. Darren has no idea what’s coming, but, thanks to Locke’s brilliant storytelling, readers will have faith that he’ll be all right.

Photo of Attica Locke by Victoria Will.

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