Shutter (2022) and Exposure (2024) by Ramona Emerson, feature Rita Todacheene, a crime scene photographer for the Albuquerque police department who can see ghosts. Raised both on the Navajo reservation by her grandmother and in Albuquerque with her mother, who died when Rita was 18, she started seeing ghosts when she was a young child, but found out quickly she shouldn’t tell anyone what she saw.
Most of the time, she can ignore the ghosts, but in Shutter, the ghost of a young woman thrown off of a highway overpass is insistent that Rita find out what happened to her, because she would not have killed herself despite suicide being the conclusion of the detective investigating the case. She won’t leave Rita alone–showing up in her apartment, while she’s driving, when she’s out with friends–so Rita tries to figure out what happened so she can get some peace, even though all the clues are leading right back to the police and the investigating detective and his connections with the local cartel.
Emerson is a former crime scene photographer and currently an Emmy-award filmmaker and author, and it shows–she describes the scenes with detail and precision, which may be a bit too gruesome for some readers.
Exposure begins with Rita’s recovery from the events at the end of Shutter, and she’s not sure she can continue in her job with the police after photographing the murder-suicide of nearly an entire family. And when she’s called to Gallup to assist with photographing the near-beheading of the owner of a local bar, the businessman’s ghost gets very insistent with her and she decides she is done. Her grandmother and friend/medicine man Mr. Bitsilly come to bring her home and pray over her, and so she begins to recover. But the ghosts aren’t quite done with her, as there seem to be several unexplained deaths in Gallup and so the detective there, who is also Diné, need her help even though the detective knows she sees ghosts. Alternating with chapters from Rita’s perspective are those of a man who claims to be an avenging angel, protecting those who might be hurt by an adult charged with their care, and dispatching those on the street who would have succumbed to alcohol and brutal winter weather.
Unless Rita figures out who is slashing throats and stops him, the Diné deaths in and around Gallup will continue.
I thought these thriller/ mysteries were very well done, gripping and engrossing. Emerson’s descriptions of the landscape made me want to visit New Mexico, and I thought Rita was an excellent character–flawed and dealing the best she could with an ability she never asked for, the one ghost she wanted to talk to–her mother–being the one who never visited.
While they were mostly weight-neutral, I do recall some anti-fat descriptions, mostly in Shutter when discussing a character who was a villain, which just perpetuates anti-fat bias. So I have to give them the anti-fat label.
Reading While Fat 