Trail of Lightning is urban fantasy with a Navajo twist. I'll be the first to admit that urban fantasy is not my genre, and while I appreciated something more creative than 'what if vampires and faeries, and they're at war?', something about this book didn't quite come together for me.

Maggie Hoskie is an emotionally damaged badass who hunts monsters, and is afraid that she is becoming a monster herself. She's got a tangled mentorship-romantic relationship with Neizghani, a powerful immortal monster-slayer from Diné legend. She's also got a new partner, a handsome medicine man with usual powers who's Too Charming and untrustworthy while also being super nice and handsome. People eating monsters are popping up across Diné territory, and Maggie has to track down the source while dealing with her feelings, a long list of enemies in authority, and the sudden appearance of Coyote, who has a quest. If you know anything about Coyote, that is very bad.

The setting is both really evocative, but also kinda nonsensical. It's been ten years since the Big Water, a cataclysmic event that wiped out most of the coastal cities and ended the Fifth World (what we live in now, according to the Navajo). Diné lands were protected by a sacred wall, which has turned into a 50' solid barrier of materials matching the cardinal directions. There are other polities; the remains of Albuquerque are run by water barons, and Mormons finally built their Zion, but the setting is distinctly post-apocalyptic. And yet the rez is still the rez, with canned beans and fry bread, crooked cops, and bootleg whiskey. The setting both wants to be grounded in the real world, and also be a place where Diné are manifesting supernatural abilities, divine figures show up, and the USA is a shattered wreck. I get this is urban fantasy and not hard scifi, but Roanhorse should commit more to the weirdness of Dinétah!

The other thing that didn't work is the nature of evil, and this plays a key role in the story and how it ends. Neizghani's perspective is that evil is a metaphysical reality, like a disease, and that it is contagious. You can catch evil from being near evil. Maggie's close encounter with a witch who killed her grandmother rendered her partially corrupted, possibly a threat. But Neizghani is a supernatural being who doesn't see life the same way that we do. Maybe evil is the harm that we do to others, when we deceive and use them, when we take them from the families with violence. Or maybe evil is something else, a thing out of balance? Rereading the ending, I think it's the second, humanist option, but I sort of wish it were something else.

There's a five star book in here, but I think it's encumbered by the urban fantasy tropes. Roanhorse has enough talent to recognize the tropes as bad, but she uses them rather than subverting them. A different reader may be delighted.