SOURCE: A review of Zia Summer, in World Literature Today, Vol. 70, No. 2, Spring, 1996, p. 403.

In the following review, Saez offers a positive assessment of Zia Summer.

Zia Summer, Rudolfo Anaya's latest novel, is a detective story that develops the themes of cultural identification and survival. The murder of Gloria Dominic triggers a literary quest that leads Sonny Baca, an amateur Chicano private eye and Gloria's cousin, to uncover a terrorist plot to turn the city into a nuclear wasteland. Set against the background of New Mexico in the 1990s, a time of growth in the West, the story examines the perils of rapid and culturally blind economic change. At the same time, it warns the Mexican-American community to preserve “the old ways” in the face of instability generated by an unequal modernization.

Anaya's novel is an original contribution to the murder-mystery genre. As in the classic detective story...