Hollow Beasts

Jodi Luna is forty-five, widowed, and finished with Boston. A celebrated poet and academic, she moves her fourteen-year-old daughter Mila back to the New Mexico mountains her family has lived in for generations and becomes the state's oldest game warden in training.

Her first significant arrest — a poacher, made with the help of her seventy-five-year-old uncle, a warden about to retire — marks her. The men behind the poaching belong to a white supremacist militia whose recruits have been abducting young women of colour, and the local sheriff has no interest in looking into it. Jodi finds an ally in an ambitious deputy, Ashley Romero, and goes after them anyway.

Hollow Beasts is the first Jodi Luna novel: a rural thriller rooted in land, language and Nuevomexicano heritage, with a protagonist whose weapons are stubbornness and local knowledge as much as a badge. The Washington Post named it one of the ten best mysteries of 2023.