The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 5 November 2013
by Tony Hillerman
This novel is the first in Tony Hillerman's popular series of mysteries that take place on Navajo reservations in Arizona and New Mexico. His protagonist, Joe Leaphorn is introduced here, well before the younger Jim Chee appears. And here, Leaphorn doesn't even seem to be the central character in the mystery. A young man accused of stabbing a Mexican in a bar fight goes missing into a forbidding high desert landscape. When he turns up dead a hundred miles away, Leaphorn is called in to investigate. Meanwhile, Bergen McKee, a college professor, is out in the same landscape studying the recent history of the myth of witches in the local tribes. The two investigations cross paths when it turns out a witch has been terrorizing people in the mesa country. Is the witch a murderer? Will McKee find him, or will Leaphorn? And what is the witch after? The puzzle unfolds almost entirely from McKee's point of view. He is chased across the mesa and through ancient Anasazi ruins, though the solution might be more modern than anybody expects. The book is a basic but engrossing mystery. The landscape and the people, but especially the Native American culture, are unique aspects of Hillerman's books. There is a clash between white men and the Navajo. There is a clash between traditional and modern. Though first published in 1971, the book has a timeless quality. We're introduced to a character who will grow more complex with subsequent books, as will the landscape and its people.
Also by Hillerman: [The Fallen Man] [Sacred Clowns]