Valley of Bones Book

The setting is Miami. Rookie cop Tito Morales arrives at the Trianon hotel to investigate a routine disturbance call and, to his shock and horror, watches as a wealthy oil man plunges ten stories and impales himself on a nearby fence. Soon Morales is joined by detective Jimmy Paz, famous throughout the city for solving - or at least providing a plausible solution to - the so-called Voodoo Murders that left Miami burning months earlier.

Together Paz and Morales enter the hotel and discover in the dead man's room a most unusual suspect, an otherworldly woman by the name of Emmylou Dideroff. She emerges from a prayerlike state and says she wants to confess and asks for a pen and several notebooks.

What Emmylou writes is nothing like what Paz expects; he enlists psychologist Lorna Wise in an effort to make sense of things that go beyond Emmylou's explanation of the murder: details of childhood abuse, of other crimes committed, of regular communion with saints - and with the...

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

… Valley of Bones has enough originality to back up its easily excited imagination. And at its core is the kind of ineffable mystery that's worth more than the corpse-out-a-window kind. Mr. Gruber is at least as eager to fathom the violent and the unknown as he is to exploit these things. Some books simply relish the darker sides of human nature. Mr. Gruber summons them with troubled inquisitiveness, with both brio and regret.