This is Fresh Air. I'm Sam Brigger sitting in for Terry Gross.

When your first novel gets longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction,

you must be doing something right. That's the place our guest, Ramona Emerson,

found herself this year with her supernatural crime thriller, Shudder.

Shudder's hero is Rita Tadachitni, a forensic photographer for the Albuquerque police department.

If you don't know, a forensic photographer's job is to document all the details of a crime scene.

The novel starts with Rita driving up to one. The police have closed a part of the highway,

where a suspected suicide has occurred. As she leaves the scene, she is confronted by the victim's

ghost, who insists she was murdered, and pressures Rita to revenge her. Rita is not terribly shocked

by the ghost's visitation as she's been seeing ghosts all her life. But this ability has caused

her a lot of trouble, especially as she is Navajo or Dine as the Navajo's call themselves,

and in the Dine culture there are many taboos around death. Rita reluctantly gets drawn into the case,

which involves corrupt police and the Cinelloa drug cartel. The crime story of Shudder's

interwoven with chapters about Rita's upbringing into a Hatchie, New Mexico, which is in the Navajo

Nation, and her close relationship with her grandmother, her primary caregiver. The first draft of

those chapters was originally meant to be part of a memoir, and if you look at Ramona Emerson's

life, you'll see she shares quite a few similarities with her character Rita, although I don't think

Ramona sees ghosts. Emerson also grew up into Hatchie with her grandmother and was a forensic

videographer and photographer for 16 years in Albuquerque where she lives. Ramona Emerson is also a

documentary filmmaker and owns a production company with her husband called Real,

as in Film Real, Indian Pictures. Ramona Emerson, welcome to Fresh Air.

Thank you so much Sam, and it's good to be here. Well it's great to have you here. I was wondering if

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