Leigh Haring endangers her life to discover why her sister died and becomes involved in an effort to prevent a government seizure of a valuable resource on native American reservation land When a college instructor is raped and killed in a small New Mexico town, early reports tagging her as a flaky, drug-dealing flower child suggest that no real investigation will occur. Her Boston sister roars into town to goose the sheriff and discovers a daily journal in the dead woman's laptop computer that rips the field of inquiry so wide open that even national security agents get involved. The computer reveals a secret effort to identify strategic materials located in Hopi sacred grounds; a parallel plot traces the mysterious death of the sisters' mother in the 1960s. Hirsh, author of the well-received Kabul ( LJ 1/86), swirls together ancient elements of Hopi tradition with modern flash and comes up with a sensitive exploration of family, drugged dreams, and the clash of Anglo and Native American cultures. Dense with powerful emotions and well-drawn characters, this fast-paced, insightful novel will have special appeal for Tony Hillerman fans. - Barbara Conaty, Lib. of Congress Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. Hirsh's first novel, Kabul (1989), won praise for its deft handling of multilayered conflict--political, cultural, and personal--against the backdrop of the Afghan War. In Dreaming Back , Hirsh performs similar magic in her native land. Boston jewelry designer Leigh Haring's effort to understand the murder of her older sister Leni in an isolated hillside home in Chama, New Mexico, forces the young artist to confront a tangle of complications: from the CIA's experiments with mind-altering drugs in the 1950s and Leni's anthropological dissertation research into the uses of natural hallucinogens to the religions of Native Americans and the global competition for superconducting materials. It might seem Hirsh's novel carries too much baggage, but the author keeps her narrative grounded in its concern with what is owed : between spouses, sisters, parents and their children; between lovers, friends, citizens and their government; and between a "nation of immigrants" and the peoples who lived on this continent "before Columbus." Long after the tense final scenes of Dreaming Back resolve the mystery of Leni Haring's murder, readers will be haunted by the larger issues Hirsh's story dramatizes. Mary Carroll The Chama, New Mexico, police are satisfied that jewelry designer Leigh Haring's adventurous older sister Leni, a doctoral student of mind-altering drugs, was strangled by her half-Hopi lover Ben Naya. But Leigh, flying in from Boston, is persuaded by conversations with Ben's half-sister Vera and Ben himself (now hiding in a cave on the nearby reservation) that her death had more to do with a mysterious crystal found on the reservation--and with what she knows about the death of their mother when Leigh was only three. The links between CIA experiments with LSD back in the 50's and superconductors that could revolutionalize contemporary computer technology are slow to emerge in this dense, opaque story, but the weighty sense of individual consequence is well worth the wait. Smaller in scale than Kabul (1986) but just as resonant: an unusually personal approach to Tony Hillerman territory. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.