EVE TWIST BOOKS

Meet Eve Twist. She is not your ordinary Tucson Police Department cold case detective. Nothing against the great detectives Philip Marlowe or John Rebus. Eve is just not the urban noir type. This is not the dark 1930s Los Angeles or even Edinburgh. Eve’s world is Tucson today; but other worlds, past worlds, keep reaching up from the grave into her world. Eve’s job is to put those ghosts back where they belong so they can peacefully move on.

In Barrio Sonata, Eve is called to the old barrio by her friend, Sheriff Sam Cooper. A human skull is unearthed at a construction site on South Meyer Avenue and sets off a chain of events. Was it a body buried to hide a murder, or something else? Eve, with Sam’s help, must find out who the skeleton belongs to, and who put it there in its grave. Her search involves revisiting 1960s Tucson, the city’s destruction of the old barrio, civil rights uprisings, and anti-war protests. What, if anything, do they have to do with the grave on Meyer? Which of the many suspects that move in and out of Eve’s pursuit, knows the truth?

The discovery of a murdered victim’s notebook at one of the old adobes along the Broadway Boulevard construction project prompts Eve Twist to reopen an investigation that had gone cold years ago. Does the notebook contain clues to the crime that might lead Detective Twist to the killer? Who were the people in Emily Jacobs’ life? And do any of them know what happened to her that night behind the old adobes?

Emily had been a visiting professor in the College of Architecture at the university. She was teaching students to see the dynamics of the Broadway project. Who was against the road widening and why? Who supported the expanded traffic patterns and why? Was the preservation of modernist architecture along the Sunshine Mile a fateful factor? Emily herself had argued strongly against the modernist style. Did her activist work get in the way of someone’s career? Or profit? Eve Twist has only the notebook to go on. She and Sheriff Sam Cooper must build the case up from there, knowing that a murderer is still out there watching.

Eve Twist finds herself invited to a potluck in Tucson’s Dunbar Spring neighborhood. It’s an area west of the university up against the railroad tracks. And, as Eve finds out, it is also the historic home to Tucson’s black American population. Before Detective Twist can find out more about the historically segregated district, tree-planting neighbors discover a burial site. Eve is called to the site as archaeologists and the county medical examiner hover over the two exposed skeletons.

The grave is at the edge of the old Court Street Cemetery that ran along the northern border of Dunbar Spring. That cemetery was closed in 1916 and the burials moved to other sites. But not all of them. Residents in that area still unearth human bones, and bones continue to reach back up to the living. Do the two skeletons newly unearthed belong to the old Court Street Cemetery? Or are they more recent and the result of foul play? Eve must find out. As she pursues the answer, she must learn more about the old Dunbar area and the racial codes and restrictions that ran through earlier Tucson. Did someone or ones transgress those codes? If so, did that result in violence leading to death? How will Eve begin to find that out? If anyone in the neighborhood knew the truth, they likely had a reason to remain silent. What else might Eve uncover as she peeled back the layers of segregation and discrimination? Had Tucson left that history behind? Or was it reaching back up into her world?