Published: 2002
Hats Off Press, Tucson, AZ
ISBN-13: 978-1587361470

Ghost in the Rainbow available at

Publication Reviews

Published in The Independent Newspaper, Edgewood, New Mexico, March 19, 2003.
Mountainair novel a rare pleasure

One of the rare pleasures of being a New Mexican -- shared in equal measure by residents of few other state -- is regularly encountering books that hold up a mirror to the people and places we know well and are fond of. The latest example is Ghost in the Rainbow, a new novel by American Indian writer Joan Leslie Woodruff, who has been a Mountainair based freelancer for The Independent.

The heroine is a freelance writer for a sizable local weekly newspaper, and one of the major characters is an editor single mindedly focussed on publishing solid news and doing it first. Whether the fictional editor resembles the editor of The Independent is moot.

The novel also contains a long chapter recounting an investigation of Pancho Villas kidnapping of a local woman, an episode that Woodruff detailed in a two-part series in The Independent.

Woodruffs use of local scenes and characters does not stop there. Her villain haunts the pay telephone at the Torreon Post Office. The editor and heroine head out for the Willard Cantina but never make it.

The book climaxes in the Manzano Mountains. Scenes unwind in Albuquerque, Socorro and Los Lunas. The heroine, like Woodruff, lives on a ranch outside Mountainair. US 60 laces together much of this story as profoundly as the Salt Mission Trail links Southern Torrance County.

Woodruff is a woman of many parts and skills. In real life she has learned a great deal about many fields, including journalism, criminology, investigations, horses, veterinary science, ranching, psychology, and substance abuse counseling. She deploys this formidable array of lore to elucidate the nooks and crannies of her dramatic story. The plot deals with a man accused of the brutal killing of a child, who is believed to be his son. He denies his guilt and seeks to enlist the reporter in proving his innocence. The central thread of the novel is the cat-and-mouse game between the reporter and the accused killer. But wrapped around this thread are other tentacles. The reporters life is coming apart as her husband abruptly absconds.

Life for her becomes a bed of dissatisfaction She is tempted to retreat into the alcoholism that for years dogged her life and her marriage, but is saved by the American Indian roots that she is able to tap into. It all makes for a fast paced dramatic tale of rapidly shifting scenes and subjects, tied together by one womans struggle to solve the riddles of a brutal crime and an unraveling life.

-- Wally Gordon

Reader Reviews

Ms. Woodruff has told a story which may let us find someone we know within. Humor, animals, human nature, and a nasty crime all with a twist of SW USA.

-- Thomas Tetzlaff

Reading this book is like jumping from a plane without a parachute.
Funny thing is, you love it! Highly recommended. I'm already waiting for the author's newest book. I actually like that jumping without a parachute feeling !!!

-- John T. Davidson

Myra Whitehawk's so very true-to-life's internal battles are portrayed so vividly in this story. Her Native American background adds such an interesting aspect to her character. This book was hard to put down-I highly recommend it!

-- C. Baca

I am neither a Native American nor anyone who has suffered from substance abuse but I am an animal lover and I LOVED this book. I loved the characters, the story, and the way it was written. I had a hard time putting this book down. I think this story would make a good made-for-TV movie.

-- An Amazon.com customer

Ghost in the Rainbow is a compulsive read. I couldn't put it down. Because of my own battles with alcoholism and substance abuse, the path the heroine takes touched me deeply and even helped me to confront some of my own demons. That I should be so spiritually and psychologically helped by a book of crime fiction illiustrates how deeply real is Ms. Woodruff's understanding of life. After the vapid musings of many of the current bestsellers, Ghost in the Rainbow explores the extremes of human emotion with courage, humor and the rare sensibility of a Native American worldview. Without a doubt, one of the best novels of the year.

-- An Amazon.com customer

What a fabulous read! Woodruff deftly intertwines her thrilling search for a serial killer with the internal journey of Native American writer Myra Whitehawk as her life disintegrates around her. The book never loses momentum and provides us with moments of genuine feeling and insight. I highly recommend it!

-- Ruth Strassberg

This is a thrilling story of one woman's determination to learn the truth behind the murder of a young child. Her search for truth plunges her not only into the world of a psychotic killer but into her own inner world where she must confront personal relationships, alcoholism and her desperate search for spiritual peace. This is also a story of the bond between a woman and her dog that transcends both time and bounderies of this physical world. Myra Whitehawk is one of the most compelling characters in my reading experience, and Ghost In The Rainbow is a book you won't want to miss. I'm glad I didn't!

-- Karen Glinski

Regardless who you are or what you read, you can't be anything but 100 percent into this Native American story. I wish I had a "ghost in the rainbow." We should all be so blessed by our "ancestors".

-- An Amazon.com customer

I am an American Indian woman, too. This is a story that made me laugh and cry alot. I knew Myra. She was my sister, my cousin, my aunt. She had some problems, but she was a strong person, and sometimes I felt like she was right there telling me why she did some of the stuff she did. But I already knew why she did. You might get mad at her, then you just want her to be okay. And I really cried alot for the ghost in the rainbow.

-- An Amazon.com customer

GHOST...is a powerfully effecting book. It is both metaphysical and yet intensely physical. By focusing on the tenuous border between madness and what we take for sanity, Joan Leslie Woodruff strips away the layers of the mind of a psychotic, a murderer who soon becomes fixated on the author's protagonist, Myra Whitehawk.

 Whitehawk herself is wrestling with her own form of madness as we meet her, recently separated from a cold-fish of a husband and slipping in and out of acute alcohol dependency. With a voice that remains authentic from start to finish, Ms. Woodruff explores that hidden territory which lies between delusion and reality, life and death, conscienceless cruelty and sacrificial compassion. With a wisdom that can only come from deep personal experience she leads the reader into those vulnerable places within the human and animal psyche in which we are shown how our very humanity, our compassion and caring, emerge from the deep flaws in our characters which we are trying sometimes hopelessly to master. Contrasted with this is the cool, cruel, acutely intelligent, but ultimately machinelike mind of the psychotic.

-- Timothy Wyllie, a best-selling author
Dolphins, E.T.'s and Angels