Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

Blood Mountain by Alisa Lynn Valdes is the 2nd book featuring Jodi Luna, a Fish & Game Warden for the state of New Mexico. I found this second book as captivating as the first. In this outing, Jodi is sent by her political savvy boss to attend a weekend elk hunt on the ranch of the richest man in New Mexico, Jodi’s purpose is to please and elicit a huge campaign donation.

Although the people who are awaiting her at the ranch are ignorant, rude and overbearing, Jodi does her best. The weekend gets off to a rocky start as a snowstorm moves in, knocking out the power and bringing frigid weather. One of the guests goes off by himself and ends up with an arrow in his back. His body is found by the only neighbour who didn’t sell out to the billionaire and she allows her pet bear to snack on the body. Everything does eventually get straightened out but not before Jodi’s daughter finds herself in trouble.

With plenty of suspects to chose from, the identity of the killer as fun to try and figure out. I was a little disappointed in Jodi as she is very prone to letting her emotions rule over her reason, but her daughter Mia kept her head and behaved as I hoped a heroine would. These are fun and very readable stories and I have my fingers crossed that there will be more Jodi Luna books.… (more)

Hollow Beasts by Alisa Lynn Verdes is the first book in her crime thriller series featuring Jodi Luna a rookie game warden who in her first week on the job has a series of encounters with a group of white supremacists who are camping out in the wilds of New Mexico while planning a terrorist attack in the hopes of stirring the like-minded to rise up against non-whites. To keep themselves amused, they are kidnapping young women of color to torture and hunt.

This group is not very clever. Their methods are sloppy, their members inept and their plans are not well thought out. In order to control Jodi, they kidnap her daughter, Mila not realizing that Mila is almost as well versed in wilderness tactics and survival as her mother. Having grown up in the area, Jodi is very familiar with this remote country and, assisted by Deputy Ashley Romero, the two women set out to take this group of supremacists down.

I thought that Hollow Beasts was a great launch to a series that promises to be full of action. Although I thought the writing could have been improved somewhat, I am a fan of books that are set in the outdoors and I enjoyed reading and learning about the area and the Hispanic culture. With a tough, smart heroine and plenty of interesting secondary characters I am looking forward to the next book.… (more)

'Blood Mountain' is the second book in the Jodi Luna series about a poetry professor who, after being widowed in her forties, returns with her daughter to her native New Mexico and becomes a Game Warden.

'Blood Mountain' is a good thriller that has the misfortune of standing in the shadow of the excellent first book. 'Hollow Beasts'. I had fun with 'Blood Mountain' and I'll definitely be continuing with this series but it didn't grip my imagination in the way that 'Hollow Beasts' did.

In 'Blood Mountain', Jodi has been sent by her boss to lead a weekend elk hunt for a family of billionaires who have bought up land in the mountains to create a 1,000 square-mile ranch on which they have built a behemoth of a 'Fishing Lodge' that they occasionally vacation in.

The Elk hunt faces some problems. The first is that the Lodge can only be accessed by a road that passes through the land of the only local who refused to sell the land her family has owned for centuries to the billionaires. She is a tough, eccentric octagenarian who speaks only in Bible verses, lives in a shack with her goats and a black bear that she raised from a cub, and has a habit of firing homemade arrows at people who pass through her land. The second is that a major snowstorm is likely to shut down the hunt and to cut the Lodge off from the rest of the world. The third and most important is that the billionaire brothers are aggressive, entitled, sociopathic narcissists who can't stand each other.

A lot of the fun in this book comes from the 'male billionaire freakshow' aspects of the story. At one time, I might have thought that their behaviour was too monstrous to be real Nowadays, all I have to do is think of Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr for everything to seem well-grounded in reality.

There is more to the story than billionaires behaving badly. Someone is trying to kill them.

The book opens with Dona öourdes Lavato taking her pet bear for a walk and finding the corpse of man with an arrow in his back. Then the action rolls back a day and we see Jodi being told to get herself out to the ranch.

The 'Who is the killer and what motivates them?' part of the book works well. Even though killing either of the brothers off might easily be seen as a service to humanity, there are lots of other people at risk who are easier to like. Inevitably, Jodi ends up being the only law officer for miles around. She has to find a way of keeping everyone safe and trying to find out who the killer is. This plot kept me guessing and also served to put Jodi under significant stress.

The part of the plot that required the biggest suspension of disbelief on my part was that Jodi brought her teenage daughter, Mila, to the elk hunt. True, it was on a weekend and there shouldn't have been anything dangerous going on and her daughter is kinda sorta the girlfriend of the son of one of the billionaires but even so, this seemed like a bad idea to me.

Of course, it was a bad idea that made for a much more exciting story. Mila is an engaging character and, from the events of 'Hollow Beasts' we know she can take care of herself.

I liked that Jodi and Mila effectively got a storyline each. It added to the tension, doubled the action and increased my emotional investment in the story.

Unfortunately, the story felt a little uneven to me. There were times when Jodi seemed less competent and less in control of herself than her daughter. Perhaps that's just realism given that Jodi is much more emotional than her daughter and was under a lot of stress but it still felt as if Jodi wasn't holding her own.

I liked the strong and slightly unconventional relationships in Jodi Luna's family They were vividly described, they felt real and they provided a contrast to the constant conflict and aggression exhibited by the bilionaires family.

Even so, there were points towards the end of the story when the Luna family relationships were so portrayed with so much sentimentality that I felt they were becoming candidates for living on Walton's Mountain. But that's probably just me.… (more)

ageism, blizzards, closed-circle-mystery, elitism, entitled-attitude, family, family-drama, family-dynamics, fiction, game-warden, Latinx, misogyny, mystery, New-Mexico, political-corruption, politicians, politics, read, rural, siblings, suspense, thriller, unpleasant-victims, unputdownable, wealthy*****

Since when is an over forty woman over the hill? In the tiny minds of men who need to step on others to be able to look themselves in the mirror. Rant over. Game Warden Jodi Luna left her professorship at an East Coast university to return to home and a messy family history. Her new law enforcement boss is as clueless as the high rollers she is supposed to babysit at a campground. Then comes the nasty blizzard in the mountains and the deaths. Great story that caught me by the nose until I finished it!
I requested and received a free temporary EARC from Thomas & Mercer via NetGalley. Thanks
According to Goodreads Expected publication October 16, 2024 but according to Thomas & Mercer Pub Date 16 Apr 2024 via NetGalley. Go figure.
#JodiLunaNovelBk2… (more)