The Lost and the Found: Daughter of the Morning Star by Craig Johnson

  I borrowed a book from a friend, but she asked me to confine my reading of it to my room. She thought that I could more easily avoid damaging it that way.  This is not about my record for damaging books.  It's about the situation for books in my house being difficult to control mainly due to the activities of the resident felines.  Cats are wonderful creatures, but they can get into a great deal of mischief.

 So whether I was commuting to my job, was engaged in other travel or was even reading something in another room in the house where I live, it would have to be another book entirely.  I agreed to those terms, but another consequence is that I'm reading her book more slowly.  I'm only about half way through the borrowed book, but have finished the one that I was alternating with it.  That's the subject of this review. It's a mystery in the Longmire series by Craig Johnson.

I've previously reviewed a total of four of the Longmire mysteries if you look at my reviews on Goodreads, but there has only been one on this blog.  It was a review of  Next to Last Stand, my first read of 2021 which can be found here .

 Daughter of the Morning Star is the most recent volume in the Longmire series.   I gave the review the title I did because the mystery deals centrally with a number of people who are lost in various ways, and the consequences of their being found.

 

                                 

  The main impetus for Craig Johnson to write this book is the issue of missing indigenous women.   The statistics are very disturbing. Craig Johnson tells us in Daughter of the Morning Star that 5,590 indigenous women went missing last year alone.  He wanted to bring this tragic problem to the attention of his readers.  So he put his detective Longmire on the case of a missing Cheyenne woman named Jeanie One Moon.

Yet some people in this book aren't physically lost. They are spiritually lost.  I think that Jaya, Jeanie's sister, is an example. It seems to me that for Jaya everything spiritual is linked to her sister who disappeared.  This frightens her which causes Jaya to be spiritually blocked.   Right now, Jaya is a teen basketball champion in high school, but what happens after she graduates?  Will she need to find a new center for her life?  Can she overcome her inability to connect with the spiritual and become whole?

 There were interesting historical bits in Daughter of the Morning Star that I enjoyed--particularly the origin of the term "gumshoe" used for detectives, and the account of female heroism in the Battle Where The Girl Saved Her Brother.  

This novel seems to be largely unresolved.  Reviewers on Goodreads are expecting a sequel that will answer some of the bigger questions about unexplained phenomena and events.  So Craig Johnson is asking for trust which he has certainly earned over the course of the Longmire series, and some degree of patience from his readers.  I don't know about you, but I expect my trust and patience to be well-rewarded.