Review #120
A Sgt. Jim Chee and Lt. Joe Leaphorn Mystery
Religious fervency and single-minded greed become strange but, necessary bedfellows in a plot filled, as always, with insights into the lives and beliefs of the Navajo "Dineh."
Sergeant Jim Chee lures his old boss, Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, out of retirement with news of a murder that reaches back to an unsolved mystery…one that has haunted both Chee and Leaphorn for the past two years.
Officer Bernadette Manuslito, a Tribal Police rookie discovers a white man’s body in a parked car. Manuslito is traditional Navajo and fears contamination from the spirit lingering near the corpse. She leaves the crime scene unprocessed and is criticized for mishandling evidence, leaving her boss and romantic interest Chee to cover her tracks.
Leaphorn's trademark curiosity sends him in search of possible links between this homicide and the earlier crime. The first murder occurred on Halloween day when Wiley Denton supposedly shot Marvin McKay in self-defense after McKay tried to sell him bogus information about a legendary lost gold mine. That same day Denton's wife, Linda, disappeared; she has never been heard from again. A document found later, on the present body, is the link to Leaphorn and Chee's old case. Leaphorn's recollection of what had been shrugged off as a Halloween prank out at old Fort Wingate now becomes the itch he has to scratch.
The Navajo, according to Hillerman, view gold as a substance that drives white men crazy. This tale of rabid questing for an iffy gold source bears out this belief. It also has the Hillerman mix of stationhouse politics, rich depiction of Navajo customs, evocative landscape, and prose that can move from comedy to terror in a split second.
Tony Hillerman invented the Native American mystery and nobody does it better!
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