Book 20: Ophelia's Ghost by Gary Lee Entsminger and Susan Elizabeth Elliott

Surreal and cerebral. It's 1958, and tracker Joe Hill has been asked by a friend to search for Eva, an anthropologist in her thirties who disappeared from her campsite while studying Anasazi ruins in the American Southwest. The plot is really incidental to this book's intellectual discussions, intent on finding patterns in topics a wide-ranging as Shakespeare's Hamlet (Joe's daughter plays Ophelia in a production of the play), the Anasazi, the phases of the moon, flowers and herbal healing, UFOs and government conspiracy, memory systems, folklore of the Southwest, and all sorts of other things It's a good book to just read a few pages at the time and go to sleep with all the strange idea patterns swirling in your head. All of the characters seem to talk in the same voice, likely because their primary purpose is to serve as mouthpieces for the authors' esoterica, but it seemed to fit the book. The ending was very ambiguous, and I'm still trying to puzzle it out.