[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, the plot hinges on an unsolved mystery: the strange murder of a woman, her blood drained, and the symbol of the Zia sun scratched around her navel. The work also shares with the hard-boiled detective novel of the 1940s a sense of social and political crisis. Like other popular dicks of the time, Sonny Baca, an honest but clumsy anybody, must find his way through a labyrinth of murder, political corruption, and greed, all against the background of the city's campaign for mayor.

Zia Summer, however, departs from the classic detective genre in significant ways. The harsh rapid dialogue of the hard-boiled classics gives way here to a language of poetic resonance and to a slow-moving narration that makes room for rich descriptions of the New Mexico desert. Don Eliseo, an Albuquerque old-timer, connects Sonny with his cultural past and teaches him respect and love for the beliefs and ways of his Mexican and Indian ancestors. Like characters encountered in previous works by this author (Ultima in Bless Me, Ultima or Crispin in Heart of Aztlán), he introduces into the narration a mythical world view that becomes central to the hero's resolution of the conflict. Moreover, far from fulfilling the stereotype of the individualistic detective who only relies upon a personally developed value system, Sonny Baca seeks in the collective wisdom of Don Eliseo and in the love and food of his girlfriend Rita the spiritual, mental, and physical energy necessary to solve the case. Becoming aware of his Hispanic past, Sonny comes to understand Gloria's murder as a symptom of the loss of a sense of unity with nature, brought about by modernization and misappropriation of the ancient cultural symbols by a new power-thirsty elite.

The detective in Zia Summer is on a quest not only to discover the murderer but also to find his cultural identity. Albuquerque, and more specifically the old Hispanic Alburquerque, becomes the true protagonist of this story. Anaya's focus on culture and history in the long run shifts attention away from the traditional whodunit focus of the detective novel; by the end, the unmasking of the murderer is no surprise and, ultimately, not important in itself. Anaya skillfully transforms the traditional detective novel into a novel that addresses the broader question of Mexican-American identity.