A Rapture of Ravens: Awakening in Taos

The Justine Trilogy #3

by Linda Lambert

A sizzling new novel set in Taos, New Mexico. The third in the Justine Trilogy, preceded by the award-winning, The Cairo Codex and The Italian Letters.

Anthropologist Justine Jenner travels to Taos in search of D. H. Lawrence . . . and her own identity. She stumbles into the conflict and hunt for the migration patterns of the peoples from the west. Here, she finds the Red Willow people, archaeologists, Lawrence aficionados, and artists who draw her into the riveting blend of cultures that is Taos. Lawrence discoveries include the spirituality he found on Lobos Mountain, legal documents that lay unexplored in the Taos courthouse for decades, his lost will, and letters that more fully explain his mysterious journey. After her Egyptian lover, Amir, joins her at Christmas, he returns to Cairo to lead the revolution of January 2011. The stunning finale to the Trilogy engages Justine in a life-and-death struggle with nature and with herself.

304 pages, Paperback

First published June 9, 2015

About the author

Linda Lambert earned her Ed.D. at the University of San Francisco and is Professor Emeritus from California State University, East Bay, and a full time author. Her new novel, The Italian Letters--the sequel to award-winning, The Cairo Codex--will be released October, 2014. Linda’s career has included the following roles: social worker, teacher, principal, district and county directors of professor development, as well as university professor, state department envoy to Egypt, and international consultant. Her international consultancies in leadership have taken her to Egypt, Lebanon, England, Thailand, Mexico, Canada, and Malaysia. Linda is the author of dozens of articles and lead author of The Constructivist Leader (1995, 2002), Who Will Save Our Schools (1997), and Women’s Ways of Leading (2009); she is the author of Building Leadership Capacity in Schools (1998) and Leadership Capacity for Lasting School Improvement (2003). Linda lives with her husband, Morgan, a retired school superintendent, in Santa Rosa, California, and writes historical novels.

Reviews

[Deb · Rating 4 out of 5]

The final volume of the Justine Trilogy finds the anthropologist in Taos, New Mexico, working with the Santa Fe Institute and searching for more information about her maternal great grandfather, D.H. Lawrence, who spent three years in the mid-twenties at a ranch on Lobos Mountain. Explaining the "plot" of these novels is difficult, but the journey of personal discovery that Justine begins in a crypt under an Egyptian church during a major earthquake culminates on a Mesa in northern New Mexico. As with the first two, Justine digs into the community and makes friends, chef among them a young Indian girl who desperately needs a mentor to help her overcome some major challenges in her adolescent life. Justine is an interesting independent woman with formidable academic skills who finds mysteries wherever she happens to be. Oh, and thank goodness, there is a fairly happy ending for almost all the characters. In this final volume, although Justine makes a significant discovery concerning the fate of the Mesa Verde people, I would have enjoyed a bit more explanation of the Native American cultures she was ostensibly studying.

[Gabrielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I felt compelled to read the final book of the trilogy; archeologist quest stories! Of course! However, the writing (and worse, the editing) were not strong.