Ramona Emerson has a confession: The protagonist of her award-winning first novel Shutter wasn’t initially expected to survive to the end.
“I killed Rita off several times in several different iterations,” says Emerson of Rita Todacheene, the forensic photographer who sees ghosts. “I never really expected that there was a capacity there for two, or if the first one was going to even do anything.”
But as she continued to write the book, she realized it might be important to keep her going for a while. After that, she started to envision other ways Rita’s story could continue.
Emerson’s first story about Rita, a Diné woman who turns her love of photography into a job as a crime scene photographer at the Albuquerque Police Department and gets embroiled with both the supernatural world and a brewing police misconduct scandal, was a hit, becoming a finalist for a PEN/Hemingway Award and an Edgar Award.
Rita is back in Emerson’s new novel, Exposure (Soho Crime, 2024, 288 pages), which follows her to Gallup where an unknown man is preying on the local population of homeless Native Americans. The deaths are initially believed to be deaths of exposure during the cold winter months, until an analysis of one body turns up something much more sinister. From there, it becomes a cat-and-mouse game to find the culprit.
While Shutter went back and forth in time, from Rita’s past growing up on the Navajo Nation to her present in Albuquerque, Exposure goes back and forth between Rita’s perspective and that of the killer’s. The mystery in this case isn’t who killed the victims, or even why (although the killer’s justification makes sense only inside his own head), but whether Rita and her small band of confidants will be able to stop him.
In the meantime, more trouble is brewing at the police department, with some of her colleagues now suspicious of her rumored supernatural powers. Even if she gives up her badge, it’s not likely the spirits egging her on to deliver justice will let her rest, much to the chagrin of her loving grandmother.
Emerson’s novels aren’t for the faint of heart. Like Shutter, Exposure begins with the graphic description of a crime scene, and gory and disturbing scenes continue at a fairly brisk clip throughout the rest of the book. But those who appreciate more than just a basic whodunit will appreciate the novel, which draws from a rich well of New Mexican and Indigenous history.
Some people might prefer some of that history not get discussed. But like her unflinching description of crime scenes, Emerson says she doesn’t want people to look away from the other unsavory aspects of the novel.
“There’s a lot of things about the history of Gallup that nobody likes to talk about,” she says. “And I’m going to talk about it.”
Emerson said she researched everything from bird behavior, serial killers, the residential school system, and the history of the Catholic Church: “all kinds of weird things,” she says.
She also drew on a large body of research she had done on Gallup for a documentary series project she’s working on about border town violence. Gallup sits near the edge of the Navajo Nation, and Emerson says she designed the city to function like another character in the novel.
“For me, writing about Gallup and writing about the serial killer would really be, on a larger scale, a metaphor for colonialism and for that town’s role in the colonialism of Navajo people,” she says.
Emerson knew Rita would be going home to Tohatchi in Exposure to heal after her bruising ordeal from the first book, making it inevitable that Gallup would come into the picture.
“When you live in some place like Tohatchi, like I did for years, you depend on border towns for basic things like getting groceries, going the doctor,” Emerson says. “You have to go to these towns in order to do your business, because there’s no infrastructure on the Navajo reservation. So I knew that in the context of Rita coming home, that she would have to deal with Gallup at some point.”
The book is set in the winter of 2006 and 2007, which was one of the coldest winters in Gallup history and a time when many people succumbed to exposure. Emerson said she doubts most of these deaths were ever seriously investigated.
Along with discrimination and disinvestment in Native communities, the book also puts a spotlight on mistreatment of homeless people. Emerson says she chose to include this to bring to the forefront a group of people many choose to ignore.
“I am absolutely not writing from a place of pity,” she says. “I don’t want people to pity these people who live on the streets — they don’t either. But I think they need to be seen.”
She also notes the particular irony of Native people being homeless.
“Our homeland is right there,” she says. “And so when you talk about Native people, and you talk about them being homeless, it’s just even more of a tragedy because this is their home, but it’s been taken away from them.”
Emerson wrote Shutter over the course of about a decade but Exposure over the course of only about a year and a half, while she was on tour with the first book.
“I didn’t have a lot of time to work on it like I did with the other book,” she says.
The process for Shutter took a long time in part because it was the first novel for Emerson, who comes from a filmmaking background: “I was having to learn how to write fiction,” she says.
Emerson adds that she has at least one more idea in mind for Rita to round the series into a trilogy. In the meantime, she’s keeping busy contributing some short stories to anthologies and teaching at the University of New Mexico. Shutter has also been optioned for a TV series, which could bring Emerson’s writing and filmmaking pursuits full circle if it comes to fruition.
She says she’s happy with the reception Exposure has received since it was published in October.
“I’m glad to see people are finding connection with the book,” she says. “I’m excited about that.” ◀
