From Publishers Weekly
Set in the first half of the next century when Native American tribes have seceded from the U.S. and Ireland has been united, Dietz's enthralling futurist tale knits together seemingly unrelated events: the brutal murders of humans and the slaughter of dolphins. In the Aztlan Free Zone in Mexico, where the tribes conduct diplomatic affairs, Thunderbird O'Conner, cultural attache to the Kituwah (Cherokee) Embassy, discovers the body of a vagrant who's been skinned alive. After extricating himself from police interest (here, Mounties are contract peace enforcers), he and his friend, Stormcloud Nez of the Dineh (Navaho) Embassy, investigate. Meanwhile, marine biologist Carolyn Mauney-Griffith, seeking to discover why killer whales are systematically decimating nearby dolphin pods, suffers a serious underwater accident and is declared dead; she comes back to life, however, in an ultramodern hospital. The mysteries intensify when Carolyn's brother, Kevin Mauney, arrives from Ireland and tells of a selkie murdered as he was disclosing a conspiracy against mankind and dolphins. Despite some clunky prose (and an overdependence on italics for emphasis) Dietz (Windmaster's Bane and the Soulsmith trilogy) offers some intriguing, if rather implausible, premises for a 21st-century culture.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
After some years writing consistently competent fantasy paperback originals, Deitz has been promoted to hardcover with a novel that skates (or perhaps one should say
swims) along the border between fantasy and sf. It is set in a future in which New Age values have largely prevailed, as well as multiculturalism to such an extent that even dolphins and killer whales have homelands. Unfortunately, the result has not been universal peace. Conflicts start among the two aforementioned cetacean races and proliferate from there. The resultant story is thoroughly engaging and quite witty, provided readers neither take it seriously as a New Age manifesto (which it is not) nor are so phobic about the New Age they can find no humor in any presentation of it. Readers situated between those extremes, however, ought to find and enjoy the book.
Roland Green
